the intial thought was...
- if i have a pc, xt, or an at and i have disks but no software on them, how could i get the software onto those disks without using an intermediary machine, getting an expansion card or having (the ability) to put a 360k disk drive into a modern computer...
- so then i thought, would it be possible to port adt pro to the pc. Thinking very logically, i thought the apple ii has built in rom basic, the ibm pc also has built in rom basic. The apple ii's have serial ports. I had made the (false) assumption that every pc, xt, or at came with some kind of serial port.
This wasn't a bad idea; I've had the same thought. It's an interesting problem to solve: Given a functional IBM PC/XT/AT and blank media, but no DOS boot disks, can you transfer a disk image to the PC/etc. and create a disk out of it? What could you connect between a modern system and a PC that would work? You're going to need to open up the system and connect something, so here's a list of common (for our hobby) things you could install and connect to a modern system:
- Serial port (duh)
- Parallel port
- Sound card
- Ethernet
- Joystick
(did I miss any?) Of the above, only Ethernet would not be practical, as every card is different and a small BASIC program could maybe support only one. A sound card is very easy to connect to a modern system, but would require manual effort, as well as a clever way to transmit the data (I know this is a solved problem for cassettes but I'm not familiar with protocol details). Parallel and Serial are more practical as there are BIOS routines for working with them. The joystick port would be dead simple to support as long as a suitable protocol could be designed for the transfer, although this would require some sort of special cable and host support, making it less practical for the end user.
But what if you have no peripherals at all except the keyboard port? reenigne solved this problem by discovering a factory test protocol in the BIOS that is activated via the keyboard port, and wrote a custom piece of hardware+software to use the keyboard port as a makeshift serial port. This is brilliant, but requires knowledge and skill outside the realm of most people.
I think the original proposal is reasonable. I've always thought that using a sound card would be the way to go, since all you need is anything that can produce sound (you could "play" a disk image using your ipod for example). Initializing a Sound Blaster-compatible sound card and grabbing data from it is easy; writing disk sectors is easy. Only the protocol details elude me; if anyone has some pointers to how this is typically tackled, I'd love to read up on it.
If this can be put into a program that takes a user less than 30 minutes to type, I'd consider that very useful, wouldn't you?
PS: A similar program could be used to output a disk image, to transfer disk data off of a system and make the audio files.