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FlashFloppy Hard Sector Testing

abzman said:
I'm going to be getting into trying this in a single sided single density polymorphic systems hard sector floppy controller.
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@abzman, you'd just need to use a 10 hard sector HFE image. Single density and double density use the same file type for HFEv3. And there's not any real advantage to single-sided HFE. I've attached some blank disks created by mk_hfe.py (10 and 16 sector, 40 and 80 track). Either of the 10 sector ones should work for you, since it seems your system uses 35 tracks.

I searched around briefly and didn't find documentation for the on-disk format. If nobody knows where it is documented, you could share an HFE file later and it probably isn't hard to reverse engineer. Then we could have a pm2hfe converter.
 

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  • blank hard sector hfe disks.zip
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@abzman, that was helpful for the format. I've added a pm2hfe.py to https://ejona.ersoft.org/files/floppy/ . I have nothing to test it against, so if it doesn't work just go with the original approach using pc2flop and we'll debug it later. If you know of any similar documentation for the DSDD controller, I could integrate it as well.
 
Well, it turns out all my projects tend to have hard sector floppies for some reason. I'll get to work on the polymorphic system once I get back from vcfmw, but another one that comes to mind is my exidy sorcerer. I have the s100 expansion chassis and micropolis floppy disk conteoller for it. From what I've researched it uses 16 sector media and 77 tracks worth of data. The images I find scattered around online are in .dsk format (there's a zip of disk images after all the tape images here: https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2017-01-23-software-for-real-sorcerers.htm). Buried in that zip are not only disk images but some definitions related to the format, but I don't know if that particular info is helpful for hfe conversion.
 
@abzman, the exidy sorcerer looks to use the standard Micropolis format, so the format is the same as the Vector Graphic with VGI files. The only difference for the .dsk is it does not include the (added-later) ECC bytes, which would have just been zero. So instead of the raw sectors being 275 bytes they are 270. You can use the vgi2hfe.py and pass --infile-sector-size=270 for a DSQD 665280 byte disk. You'll also want --sides=1 for SSQD 332640 byte disks, and --sides=1 --cyls=40 for SSDD 172800 byte disks.

143360 byte disks are IMG files, with 256 bytes per sector. It's possible to manage those today with fluxengine as a converter. I can make a Python converter later since it seems there's not been a recent binary release of fluxengine, but if you compile it from source, today you can do:
Code: 
# Convert from IMG to VGI
fluxengine write micropolis --143 --drive.rotational_period_ms=200 -i in.dsk -d tmp.flux
fluxengine read micropolis --143 --vgi -s tmp.flux -o out.vgi
 
About a year ago i was lucky enough to get a Sorcerer II with expansion unit, a micropolis floppy disk system, and about 80 hard sector floppy disks. I recently made up a fluxengine which i have used to archive the floppy disks some of which were MDOS (vgi option) and some of which were CP/M. It took a little while to understand how to use fluxengine and then to tweak some settings, but once i did it worked really well. The CP/M images work well with cpmtools so files can be moved around and images written back to disk. It also works fine with a virtual sector generator. I'm really impressed with fluxengine and i take my hat off to the author. Great job!
 
Hello group. I am catching up on this thread and I am very interested to see the progress that has been made using flashfloppy with the Northstar Advantage. I just restored a Northstar Advantage 8/16 and would love to use my Gotek Flashfloppy or my Lotharek with it. Is this possible now? And if so what confirguration do I need to make it work?!
 
@retrobecanes, the first post of the thread is still mostly accurate. The main adjustment is how to produce an image. Options:
 
ejona said:
@retrobecanes, the first post of the thread is still mostly accurate. The main adjustment is how to produce an image. Options:
Click to expand...
Thank you very much, I will be testing this soon!
 
Hi
I believe that you can't take one hard sectored format and make the gotek work with it, if it had software for another hard sectored system. The controllers are all different in different ways. Heath is different than N* and Polymorphic is different again.
The Gotek doesn't have enough memory on board to hold an entire track. There is a spot on the board to solder on a serial RAM but I've not figured which one it would be.
Dwight
 
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