Working with NIBs

[david__schmidt]

Working with NIB images this evening - I captured a few NIB images of my favorite disks using A2V2, part of Gerard Putter's excellent Virtual ][ software. I imaged the DOS 3.3 master disk, a DOS disk I formatted (on real hardware) with a volume number of 123, and Microsoft's Olympic Decathlon (yes, Virginia, I own a real copy. I also destroyed more than one keyboard in the Minneapolis Public School system playing it. Hopefully, most of my teachers have long since retired. Goodness knows they've earned it.)

Anyway: the results have been great. The .NIB images I created are booting fine, and the CFFA3k recognizes the differing volume numbers. This will be significant with various programs out there that depend on DOS volume numbers to discern between different distribution disks. The good news is... CATALOG recognizes the volume numbers, INIT will initialize (and re-initialize) disks with differing volume numbers successfully, and my beloved Olympic Decathlon boots. "Please go to the starting line!"

[david__schmidt]

Following up... copying these files back off the CF or USB drives again retains their attributes in the address areas - emulators and CiderPress still understand their contents. In general, I imagine the most common use case would be to just read .NIBs - but it works to write them as well, at least for the "normal" kinds of .NIB files. I suppose those copy protected ones will be more difficult to retain their protected-ness if you're writing on them as well... let me know if you can think of a case where that needs to happen.