Hello All,
A French proverb says, "A rolling stone gathers no moss." The statement is a bit silly, but the semantics is telling the truth. I traveled a lot and therefore did not "keep" a lot (nor won much anyway).
I thought I had thrown everything, related to a micro computer based on the MC6801, entirely designed and produced by me, and animated by Flex2. But no! I did not have throw the cards, and even kept some floppies! These disks are dated from 1985 - 1986. And having them found, I wanted to retrieve the contents. I spoke to the ancients always addicted to Flex, which told me that the PC could read only the disks whose sectors are 512 bytes. But I am still hitched looking for a 5.25 "drive, and I ended up found. Tonight, I finally begin to create images of these disks.
I'm happy and considers should thank you all. Even if the Developer(s) at the origin of "fdutils" is not (are not) listening to this list, the listeners whom I have read some answers, did realy help me.
So here: thank you, thank you and thank you. Patrick
On Thu, Jun 06, 2013 at 06:03:07PM -0500, Patrick Serru wrote:
Hello All, I thought I had thrown everything, related to a micro computer based onthe MC6801, entirely designed and produced by me, and animated by Flex2. But
Sounds interesting stuff, are you going to put up a webpage about it?
no! I did not have throw the cards, and even kept some floppies! These disks are dated from 1985 - 1986. And having them found, I wanted to retrieve the contents. I spoke to the ancients always addicted to Flex, which told me that the PC could read only the disks whose sectors are 512 bytes. But I am still hitched looking for a 5.25 "drive, and I ended up found. Tonight, I finally begin to create images of these disks.
... and what'll really blow your mind is that there are disk formats out there where the sectors aren't even all the same size along the track (hello, Ensoniq Mirage/SQ80) - and fdutils handles that just fine thanks ;-)
What a great bit of software.
In article 20130607065100.GE21697@gjcp.net, wrote:
... and what'll really blow your mind is that there are disk formats out there where the
sectors aren't even all the same size along the track (hello, Ensoniq Mirage/SQ80) - and fdutils handles that just fine thanks ;-)
Back in the late 80s, some folks gave me a call and asked if I could help get data off a floppy for them. It seems they'd bounced around from expert to expert, including a disk duplication specialist, but no-one could read it.
As I did a lot of floppy protection (and cracking, two hats!) I agree to take a look.
Even just hitting the PC BIOS with a selection of sector numbers and sizes was enough to show that nothing special was going on other than four different sector sizes per track so the job was done in minutes even when coding the copy code in x86 assembler.
BTW, this was totally legit as they were porting a game from an arcade machine and just needed the graphics, and the cracking I was doing was to make game compilations where the publishers has lost the unprotected masters.
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gordonjcp＠gjcp.net -
Ian Oliver -
Patrick Serru