Disk II low-level formatting hard at work

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Disk II low-level formatting hard at work

Postby david__schmidt » 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.
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Re: Disk II low-level formatting hard at work

Postby david__schmidt » Tue Oct 11, 2011 12:37 pm

Another thing that is being added as attention is focused on the Disk II emulation... direct disk image creation. This is like having a virtual ADTPro in your machine... any block device can be 'imaged' directly using the CFFA3000. Copy from floppy disk directly into a .DSK on the USB stick. Pull the USB stick out and voila! Instant disk image.

This is different than using CopyII+ or any other Apple-based copying software. It's just built directly into the firmware - no need to even boot anything. And using the built-in imager frees you from having to manage disk image files - i.e. moving a blank one into the virtual drive, moving it back out when done, etc.
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Re: Disk II low-level formatting hard at work

Postby Sprout » Tue Oct 11, 2011 2:24 pm

Now *that* is an awesome feature. I'm constantly checking in here for updates, and looking forward to the card shipping out, but features like this are *well* worth the wait!
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Re: Disk II low-level formatting hard at work

Postby david__schmidt » Thu Oct 13, 2011 10:00 am

Yeah, I was joking with the guys that this is an ADTPro killer - it's an awesome feature. I have copied images between two CFFA3000 cards in the same machine, from regular floppies (5-1/4" and 3-1/2") and from an old CFFA v2 card (the whole 32MB partition) to new image files. It's working really well.

I suppose almost the same function would be available from GSOS - you could drag images around, but you'd still have to juggle drive assignments for the destination. This is a much simpler approach to duplicating entire volumes, no matter what their size is. And you don't need to have a GS.

Sprout wrote:I'm constantly checking in here for updates, and looking forward to the card shipping out, but features like this are *well* worth the wait!

You an me both, even though I get to beta test. Rich got called out of town for work this week, so we've lost a little ground there. I know he was shooting for this week for release - but some things can't be helped.
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Re: Disk II low-level formatting hard at work

Postby magnusfalkirk » Fri Oct 14, 2011 1:48 pm

This sounds awesome. My question is: Is it possible to go the other way? Take a disk image and copy it to a real disk? I'm wondering this as I have an Apple IIc set up at work that I occasionally play games on when I have time and wondered if I could make real disks this way, as well as using ADTPro (not trying to move away from your great software, David, just curious ;-) ).

Dean
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Re: Disk II low-level formatting hard at work

Postby david__schmidt » Fri Oct 14, 2011 9:15 pm

magnusfalkirk wrote:My question is: Is it possible to go the other way? Take a disk image and copy it to a real disk?

Yes, absolutely. You would just need some software to go the other way... COPYA, CopyII+, GSOS, whatever you like. But the firmware-based copy is one-way now - from real disk to virtual image.
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Re: Disk II low-level formatting hard at work

Postby magnusfalkirk » Mon Oct 17, 2011 12:37 pm

david__schmidt wrote:Yes, absolutely. You would just need some software to go the other way... COPYA, CopyII+, GSOS, whatever you like. But the firmware-based copy is one-way now - from real disk to virtual image.



Thanks, David this is nice to know. I sort of had a suspicion it might work that simply but figured I'd ask anyway.
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Re: Disk II low-level formatting hard at work

Postby david__schmidt » Mon Oct 17, 2011 1:12 pm

And some more details - as I mentioned earlier, no OS needs to be loaded in the first place. The CFFA3000 is able to read basically any device that supports the ProDOS or SmartPort interfaces. Floppies, the ProFile, another CFFA or CFFA3000, you name it. Except for... RAM drives. I thought that would be an interesting test - but it turns out they need an underlying OS, and so they can't be supported in this firmware-based import scheme.
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