Date : Thu, 25 Oct 2001 22:26:19 +0100
From : "Richard Gellman" <r.gellman@...>
Subject: INFO: Reasonable success with FDC and ADFS disks - Interesting bit! (cackered due to bt sucking monkey willies on James Fidell's behalf)
Recently, I thought I'd give trying to read floppies in a PC a go using FDC,
this is the success i've had, and how i managed it:
I've not tried DFS discs, but ADFS discs read pretty well. I found that my
Ahkter/UserFriendly MD400B FDD (Mistubishi mechanism) required a couple of
adjustments to make it work first.
I connected the drive to the PC drive B: connector, and adjusted the link
near next to that connector from DS0 to DS1. There is a link near to the
spindle centre which has the 40/80 switch wires coming off it. That link
needs to be moved from MM to MS. The drive should be operated in 80 track
mode.
Insert the ADFS disc and start FDC
Select BBC640 and CONT - this sets up for double density, 16 sectors per
track, 80 tracks, continue on error.
GET 0 0 0 and look at byte FD - this will be 05 for a single-sided 80 track,
and 0A for a double sided 80 track. (Single sided 40 track discs (ugh) have
02 here) This byte actually equates to the middle order byte of how many
sectors are on the disc in total, and is part of the free space map. But
here it is useful for determining disc size.
You can then use READ <name>.adl for double sided discs and READ0 <name>.adf
for single sided ones.
The images I acquired (2 are games discs of mine, and 1 is the master 128
welcome disc) worked perfectly (aside from the errors that they had acquired
over the years, which were very few) in BeebEm in master 128 mode.
-- Richard Gellman
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