Using Greaseweazle to write floppy discs for FM Towns

Started by Cyothevile, December 18, 2020, 01:02:46 AM

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Cyothevile

I know it seems like I post here a lot but my intent is to document as much as I can. This forum seems like the most enduring method honestly. Originally I wanted the greaseweazle to write floppy for PC98 and X68000 but I figured trying out FMT stuff would potentially benefit someone here :) I will try those platforms once I get 5" Floppy drive and post there.


I am here to report using greaseweazle the new DIY alternative to kryoflux is working very well for writing FMT floppy discs. I used the drives I pulled out of my Fresh and hooked up the F1 greaseweazle model that I made. It's very cheap to make costing perhaps less than $20 USD. You can also hook up two drives to the device very clever device.

The first title I tried was columns and it booted on CX20 until copy protection kicked in and I expected that.
Next title I tried premium 2 and it worked!
Then I tried Dr. STOP! Which requires two discs. I used a physical disc for disc A and flash floppy gotek for disc B. CX20 read both discs at once during gameplay very excellent.

I tried to use greaseweazle to dump the only floppy disc I own for FMT but the dump came out in a TXT file format. Very odd. I hope to figure out how to fix that. For writing purposes it's working quite well. I'm leaning more towards wanting the preservation aspect of this device because kryoflux is very expensive.

Cyothevile

I've since dumped disks but greaseweazle outputs the flux dump in an SCP file format. Somehow this file is supposed to be converted in the HXC floppy program into an HFE or HDM file. And this is where I'm stuck.

This is the last hang up I have. Otherwise it's writing HFE files to disk and they run very well on original hardware. I have several floppy disks with shit dumps or ZERO dumps I've purchased for towns so far. If anyone has an idea of the right way to convert the SCP file to HFE please let me know.