Date   : Sun, 21 Feb 1999 18:00:28 -0000
From   : "Christopher Hatton" <CHatton@...>
Subject: Reading BBC Disks in ANY PC

[NOTE:

 I've removed the attachment from this message, since it was quite long.
 You can now find the Anadisk zip file at

     ftp://ftp.cloud9.co.uk/pub/Micros/BBC/Utils/

                                                            james. ]


Dear Reader,

I have sent this letter to many people in the Beeb scene in the hope that
someone will be able to make somthing good of it.

As you will probably know, BBC Disks can be read by a number of programs
such as BeebDOS and BBC Explorer etc. I have been informed through documents
on the internet and found by personal experience that with such programs
only a PC with an old (single-density supporting) disk interface and
80-track disks can be used. The impression was given that this was the only
physically possible setup for reading Beeb-disks.

However, I recently tried a shareware program called AnaDisk (which I have
attached to this mail in a ZIP). This successfully read a Beeb disk,
detecting it as single density etc, and even displaying data from the disk
on-screen in 'sector edit' mode. This is on my P200 with 5.25" disk drive
which had previously refused to read the disks with all Beeb progs I had
tried. It even read 40-track disks which were apparently a no-go area for PC
disk drives. The obvious conclusion is that the PC is perfectly capable of
reading information from Beeb disks without modifications etc . that have
been suggested in some documents I have read.

My hope in sending this letter out is that it will be recieved by someone
with the expertise and drive to create a piece of software such as BBC
Explorer or BeebDOS but using the same disk-read method as AnaDisk. This
would provide a PC<->BBC solution for all Beeb owners. I certainly have the
enthusiasm for such a project but don't have the knowledge to be able to.

Yours encouragingly,

Chris Hatton

CHatton@...

or

Darkmoon_UK@...