Disk II low-level formatting hard at work
Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2011 7:48 am
Things have been a little quiet lately - the deadline Rich has set is coming right up, and there's lots of work afoot now in the Disk II area. Normal reading and writing of course has been working fine for a while now, and choosing disk images via the menus or pushbuttons has been getting improved steadily. But to really make the solution complete, making formatting (i.e. the track sync nibbles, etc.) work is another matter.
Originally, formatting of virtual media didn't seem like an important goal - for example, the .dsk images you feed the CFFA3000 are already "formatted," in that they can have tracks full of zeroes. But the timing-sensitive task of actually laying down the timing marks on the disk has turned out to be important when using copy software - even very simple software like COPYA. COPYA, for example, tries to format the destination media before it does its work! It's easy enough to work around by changing one line in COPYA's Applesoft program (remove the INIT command in line 250) but it would be much nicer if it would all "just work." So that's what's been going on lately... right down to the wire.
Originally, formatting of virtual media didn't seem like an important goal - for example, the .dsk images you feed the CFFA3000 are already "formatted," in that they can have tracks full of zeroes. But the timing-sensitive task of actually laying down the timing marks on the disk has turned out to be important when using copy software - even very simple software like COPYA. COPYA, for example, tries to format the destination media before it does its work! It's easy enough to work around by changing one line in COPYA's Applesoft program (remove the INIT command in line 250) but it would be much nicer if it would all "just work." So that's what's been going on lately... right down to the wire.