Date   : Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:02:22 +0100
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Superform output

Does anyone have documentation for Superform's output (or has picked the code 
apart)?

I've got a couple of Tandon TM262 drives here which seem to throw Superform 
into a loop at the verification stage (with exactly the same error output on 
both).

Format completes OK for both drives, but then when it comes to verify I get 
the following output:

00 0 0 0 0 2F 0 0 0 0 0 0 Defect 1C at 0
<blank line>
10 0 0 0 0 2F 0 0 0 0 1 0 Defect 1C at 0
<blank line>
...

  - with the line starting '10' (and subsequent blank line) repeated with a 
few minutes' gap between each (during which the drive 'sounds' like it's 
behaving itself! :-)

Strange how both drives give exactly the same behaviour, which would suggest 
it's more of an access problem than a data error (possible that the logic on 
both drives has failed in exactly the same way, I suppose).

I'm sure I've got the drive geometry (including landing zone and write 
precomp) set up OK. The ACB4000/host adapter's been used to access and format 
various other drives, so I'm confident that's OK.

It's possible that the output is vaguely tied to the ACB4000's command 
request/response data; for the ACB4000 '2F' is a 'verify' command (which would 
probably make sense in this context) and there's a 'Defect 1C' corresponding 
to 'Unformatted or bad format'. The fact that it neither drive bombs out at 
the format stage would suggest that the ACB4000's at least able to access and 
step the drives OK.

Unfortunately I don't know BBC BASIC well enough to just look at the code and 
figure out how its output maps to what it's trying to do :-(

Curious...

cheers

Jules