1.44 Mb Floppy Images

[sleepydwarf]

Hi all,

Once again a cry for help I am afraid.

I am a little stumped as to how to deal with 1.44Mb floppy images. I have no problem converting and writing 1.25Mb .DIM images for use on a compact.

No matter what I have tried to do with 1.44Mb images I get no joy at all. One example of this is Popjack from the Tosec archive, but that is just one example.

I cant seem to do anything with any 1.44Mb images.

Any help or suggestions please?

[eidis]

 Hi Sleepydwarf !

You will need to use the 9scdrv driver in order to read or write exotic floppy disk formats.

Standard 2HD floppy disk format, which we are used to, has 8 sectors. Here is the list of formats supported by the 9sc driver.

0 - 2HS      (9sec/trk 1440k)
1 - 2HD      (8sec/trk 1232k) Standard X68000 format
2 - 2HDE     (9sec/trk 1440k)
3 - 2HC      (15sec/trk 1200k)
4 - 2HT       (1599k)
5 - 2DD/9    (9sec/trk 720k)
6 - 2DD/8    (8sec/trk 640k)
B - 2HQ       (18sec/trk 1440k) IBM 1.44MB 2HD format
Z - 2HDE98  (FDISK.SYS v0.98 compatible)
7 - Initialize FAT
8 - Initialize IPL

I think that you could write the image to floppy the same way we did a while ago with Illumination Laser. Download the mastering to floppy from HDD kit and examine the bat files to see how it works.

IL floppy mastering from HDD
http://nfggames.com/x68000/Games/IlluminationLaser/IL_Floppy_Mastering_from_HDD.zip

Try playing with other formats if the image is not in 2HS format.

Best of luck and let us know how it went !

Keep the scene alive !
Eidis

[sleepydwarf]

Hi eidis,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Every game I have witten so far with the exception of IL has been converted from DIM to XDF with VFIC, then written to floppy using diskimage. For IL I used your floppy mastering disk as I didn't have a hard drive in my compact.

I couldn't find anything on the PC side that would touch a 1.44Mb DIM.

I downloaded and had a look at the IL HDD master ZIP you suggested and had a look. At this point I realised I needed to sort a hard drive out. Luckily I still have a small SCSI tower that I used on my A1200s until they were towered. I then had a decent method of getting the larger files onto the compact.

I tried all sorts with DPACK, but I had no joy at all with it. Not sure what it is designed for but could not get it to do anything with the DIM images.

I did however find a solution which worked well for me, if a little long winded to be honest. 

I setup XM6 and created a Hdd, then add 9scrdv to the hard drive.
Boot XM6, load 9SCDRV.x, load 1.44Mb floppy image into driv0, then load a blank XDF image into drive 1. Some DIMs had files with attributes set so they were not usually visible with DIR, to be sure I used ATTRIB -S -H -R *.*. It was mainly human.sys or command.x but that removes attributes from the entire image before copying.
Then copy about half the files from drive 0 to the blank XDF in drive 1. Eject the XDF from drive one and write to a standard X68k formatted floppy using Diskimage.
Once witten boot X68K and insert disk into drive of choice. I created a folder called whatever the game was I was doing. Copy the contents of the floppy disk to the folder on the hard drive. Back to XM6 and re load the XDF image and format it, or delete the files and copy the remaining files from the DIM to the XDF, once again eject the XDF and write to floppy using Diskimage, pop that disk into the X68K once done, copy rest of files to same folder on Hard Drive.

I then used 9SCFMT to format the floppy disk in the required format. I booted each image in XM6 first, at the very start of the boot process it states which format is on the disk, 2HDE or 2HS is 2HDEICPL or 9SCIPL respectively, all the image I have done have been either one or the other.

Once format is completed I copied all files from the relevant folder onto the 9 sector formatted disk, reboot X68K and game then works from the floppy.

My guess is there are much easier ways of doing this with less steps, but sadly I could not find it .

I do have a couple of questions, more to do with HUman68K than anything.

Human OS is so similar to good old MS DOS I have found my way with it fairly well, BUT does anyone know if Human has an equivalent of DELTREE to remove folders and contents, as I have been using RMDIR, which is fine as it does the job but folders need to be emptied beforehand which is a bit of a pain.

The other thing is in MS DOS you could use DIR/A to do a directory listing of files with attributes set, such as DIR/AH would list all files with hidden attribute set, is that possible in human os?

Thanks again

[eidis]

Hi Sleepydwarf !

Yes, there is a simpler and faster way. You can create a lha archive with the contents of 1.44mb floppy image, transfer it to X68000 hard drive and use the floppy mastering kit to write it back to real floppy disk. I went through the TOSEC and created archives of 1.44 images so that you don't have to
do it.

Get them here:
http://nfggames.com/x68000/Uploads/1.44mb/

Some of them will not fit on a standard formatted floppy disk so you will need to use the program COPY2.X to create spanned volumes and then restore them to physical hard drive.

Do not bother with HumanOS command line. LHES is much nicer, translated and has integrated LHA support.

Keep the scene alive !
Eidis

[H68k]

It seams trying to write 3 and-a-half inch floppy disk's from another other machine other than an X68k is a game of trial, error.. and pot luck.

All of my attempts to write anything to 3 half inch disks so far, have resulted in failure.. One comp I use will format the disks in the format required by the X68k.. but wont write disk images or anything else to them.. while the other will not format them.. but gives you the impression it's wrote something to the disk.. but after putting the disk in my X68k compact, it will nether boot off them or read anything from them when running off a jerry rigged SCSI drive I have hooked up to it.   

[eidis]

 Hi H68k !

Which drive and tools do you use to write the disks ?

Keep the scene alive !
Eidis

[H68k]

I use Omniflop on both machines eidis.

One is a rebraned Compaq one in a deskpro en series, I can't tell who manufactured it..  (it was brought from a computer fair some years ago. I suspect it was an ex-bussiniess machine that has several thousand miles on the clock before I added some more to it)

The other is an Epson one that's only taken out of parts storage and connected up to my daily workhorse on the occasion I needed to write a 3 and a half inch floppy disk. (it's been used to write quite a lot of them mind you)

[eidis]

 Hi H68k !

The drive needs to be compatible with mode3 (1.25mb, 360rpm), otherwise it will not work. Try obtaining one of the compatible USB drives, using DiskImage v1.3b and following instructions in the following tutorial:

Writing 3.5" floppies
http://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=x68000:writing_3.5_floppies

Keep the scene alive !
Eidis

[sleepydwarf]

Hi eidis,

Thanks again. I have now written the 1.44Mb images I needed, or rather wanted I guess.
Your method does sound much straight forward, though I am a little confused. I ask this just to expand my knowledge, but when you say create LHA of contents of the floppy image, how do you do that? Do you just LHA the DIM files? I could not find any way of extracting files from 1.44Mb DIMs, diskexplorer/diskedit opened some but continuously gave errors when trying to copy files.

VFIC allowed me to convert to a few different images types other than XDF but nothing I tried to do with any of them worked.

H68K I have been using either a Sony PCGA-UFD5 or Toshiba PA3109U-1FDD with Diskimage v1.3b and every write has been fine, and I have done a lot, still have loads of floppies around from early PC days so have recycled those. I have tried to use Omniflop as part of my experiments to sort a method for 1.44Mb images, but I first tried it on standard 1.2Mb images. I installed it to a few different machines with very varying results. The machine that it reported the drive of being able to support 285 ish different formats on the 3.5" drive was the system I tried most with but could not get a single disk to boot on the machine itself.

Diskimage on one of the above mentioned USB floppy drives just works first time every time for me.

[eidis]

 Hi Sleepydwarf !

Here is the procedure which I used:

1) Copy 9SCDRV.X to HDD V4, boot from it in XM6. Once in LHES, execute 9SCDRV.X
2) Mount 1.44mb floppy image as Drive 0 and switch to it by pressing "3" on numeric keypad
3) Select all files, except command.x and human.sys by pressing space bar.
4) Press SHIFT+F1 and select first compression method in the list, enter name for the archive which will be created and press enter, select "DIR info" and "Recurse DIR", press enter. It will create a new archive in the root of drive A:

Keep the scene alive !
Eidis

[sleepydwarf]

Hi eidis,

Ahah yeah that is a much much quicker method than what I did. I do enjoy doing stuff like that though as crazy as that sounds, really did bring me back in time, probably as much as games playing does on these and other older systems does.

Thanks again for your time and help.

[eidis]

 Hi Sleepydwarf !

I know what you mean. By the way, the following article might interest you.

Human68k 3.02 COMMAND.X commands
http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5326.0

Keep the scene alive !
Eidis