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Making TRS-80 model III floppies

A

andy

Experienced Member
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Oct 22, 2008
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268
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Austin, TX
I'm looking for the best way to turn disk images into physical floppies for my model III. So far, I have been able to make TRS DOS and LDOS boot disks using an emulator on a DOS PC with a 360k floppy drive.

I'm having no luck with the software that is on self booting floppies. Neither OS even recognizes the file system on these disk images, and the few disk copy utilities I've tried so far don't make usable disks. The emulator does boot from these disk images, so I know they are valid.

Assuming it's even possible, can anyone recommend a method for writing protected/non-standard bootable disk images onto floppies?

Here are some of the disk images I'm trying to use:

http://electrickery.xs4all.nl/comp/trs80-4p/dmkeilImages/game/index.html
 
Hey there -- I have been trying to use IMD to do this as it can write DSK files (once converted.) It's a bit tricky because you have to convert the file first to IMD format. I had to fiddle with switches to do this. You'll need to use your DOS computer + 360k drive of course. So far I have only successfully made a TRSDOS floppy with it but I didn't spend much time fiddling around with it.

http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm

(IMD 1.18 is downloadable here.)
 
I used an HxC and either Trakcess or Copycat on a Model I, III or IV. For the send booting games, many times they would do single and double density on the first track and SU+ will copy them. Best way is to do all of the same ones in order, once the first one has been figured out with special backup, I was able to do all the others. I only have a few that I have not figured out yet.

I usually use a Model I with a MIRE because it ensures I can handle the correct DAMs for TRSDOS 2.3, good old Randy.

For those Big Five I was able to use Copycat just fine.
 
TRAKCESS by Roxton Baker works great in my PC with both 360KB and 3.5" floppy drives. I use David Keil's emulator and have made bootable disks of Big Five games, Floppy Doctor, and others.
 
I use Davids emulator and either the backup command or copycat on an old DOS PC with a 5.25 drive, it works great.
 
@rittwage Usually you do need a controller that will handle Single density for Model 1 and most on board controllers won't work for SD mode. Some will though but can't remember off hand which.

What I do is use an older Adaptec AHA-1522 SCSI controller. It's floppy controller handles Single density just fine. Also the AHA-1542 will work just as well. It is an ISA card and just hook up your floppy drive to the AHA and disable the on board floppy controller through the PC BIOS. Hope that helps!

Model III and 4 are ok with on board controllers for the most part.
 
Last edited:
rittwage said:
Don't you have to have a floppy controller on the PC capable of writing single density? I think that's rare unless a very old PC...
Click to expand...

The OP asked about Model II floppies, which are double density. For the Model I, you do need single density capability. My ASUS TUSL2-C Pentium III mobo does handle SD disks. After creating a SD TRSDOS real floppy, I use MultiDOS' DDAM command to fix the DAMs to be TRSDOS compatible, which the ASUS controller (or almost any other) can't produce.
 
SU+ says one of the disks I'm trying to make (Zaxxon) is SD. Also, it failes the SD test on TestFDC.

I've been trying to pretty old floppy controllers in a Pentium board (including all the way back to IBM AT and XT era cards). Does the PC's BIOS have anything to do with this?
 
The controller on my P4 board reads and writes (FDTest) FM just fine. Doesn't pass that 128-byte MFM test, though--but that's a very small category of floppy formats.
 
Thats one (Zaxxon) I used copycat on and it worked for the double boot disk. I did it on a Model IV.
 
I finally got it to pass testFDC once using an AHA-1542CF, but subsequent tests fail with the error "NoAdrMark".

Still no luck on making a working disk. Copycat just sits on track 00 reporting "single density format error". SU+ 3.2 goes through the motions, but I get "disk error" when I try to boot from it. Is there a particular version of Copycat you recommend?
 
I was using 4.18, but remember I was on a real Model 4 or 1, based on the games. I have the lotharek SxD plugged in as Drive 2.
 
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