How to get 720KB on Opus Discovery floppy (using PC drive)
I upgraded an Opus Discovery yesterday with a PC drive, but I'm looking for the way to get a floppy formatted as 720KB.
If I understand other topics correctly, I should find a utility to achieve this.
There should be several utilities, but no topic shows the name or link to such a utility.
Where can I find such a utility?
Or is there some BASIC I can type in to perform the necessary changes to the Opus (ram)?
Then, if I found that utility, how can I get it to the Opus?
At this moment I only have pc's without internal floppydrive in use, but I do have USB drives.
Will SamDisk work on a USB drive under Windows7?
Maybe it's more easy to load the utility from tape/mp3 player.
If I understand other topics correctly, I should find a utility to achieve this.
There should be several utilities, but no topic shows the name or link to such a utility.
Where can I find such a utility?
Or is there some BASIC I can type in to perform the necessary changes to the Opus (ram)?
Then, if I found that utility, how can I get it to the Opus?
At this moment I only have pc's without internal floppydrive in use, but I do have USB drives.
Will SamDisk work on a USB drive under Windows7?
Maybe it's more easy to load the utility from tape/mp3 player.
Post edited by bverstee on
Comments
I have done the same upgrade to my Opus years ago. If you manage to find a way to format 720K floppies please let us all know.
Cheers
Hope that helps.
This 8192,300 block of data can be saved to and loaded from disk. And changes can be made in between, f.e. you load it temporarely to 30000.
The table layout can be found in the ROM disassembly available on WOS. As a first step all you need to change is 40 in to 80. (Note that there are 4 equal tables.)
There were several programs available for the job. I must have several, somewhere in my piles. Lately the one from Helge Keller (Lily Soft) was dicussed here. I believe.
Most programs also allow to change the interleave factor, for the next disk to format. (See quickdos)
The Opus system can use sector length up to 1 (or was it 2) Kb, all the standard IBM3820(?) values. But large buffer sizes prevent the loading of large files.
Ok, it does dazzle me a bit, but let me try to get this clear in my head:
The disk specs for each separate disk are stored on the disk?
And the Opus reads and stores these specs everytime it accesses a disk?
That's quite different from what I'm used to with every other system (PlusD, MB02, etc), where the disk specs are read only once: from the system file.
That's exactly what I mean, with the disadvantage that it's (very) unclear to new users where to start / what to do, especially with those differences in the roms.
Maybe the top of the Opus case should be used for a 'getting started' guide ;)
P.e. in my copier program for 720K DOS disks is Opus handling the fetching of 512 bytes sectors (1-9) all by it self. The program merely does the (FAT) bookkeeping, and the sending out of 256 bytes sectors (0-17), or whatever layout the receiving disk may have.
Back in those days the main user group existed of people whose only desire it was to understand the technique to it's deepest details, and the Opus Discovery offered that challenge ;)
It's great that some understand these techniques completely and I love reading about it.
People like you are needed roko, even like those who develop the modern operating systems.
However IMHO end-users shouldn't worry about this complexity, but only about how to use the system in a simple way.
I mean: I still haven't had a simple awnser to my question about how to format a 720KB disk on an Opus Discovery haha!
I will download the tools from the website that Pluto63 showed, hoping one of them can be used to achieve the 720KB format.
I think, people who are looking for a simple system without need of special knowledge can use Wintel PCs , Smartphones, Emulators or for example one of those simple to use divIDE interfaces together with a Spectrum.
People who like to use an experimental computer with the flair of those "first days of (home) computing" should try to understand their system a bit, because it is not that complex and that type of technical understanding keeps that old systems living.
Greets Ingo.
But then, you did not tell whether you want double/single density, double/single side, write compensation On/Off, head settling delay On/Off, Deleted Data Mark Yes/No, enabled or disabled Spin-up sequence. Nor did you mention the steprate of your drive, the number of sectors and number of tracks you want, and even forgot the skew and interleave factor. (Haha....) :-):smile::smile:
The problem is Ben that these are the issues to address when people want to go beyond the system as standard sold. Sometimes new standards are settled. Like you do when you decide to sell Opus 'standard' with 2.2 ROM. And another new standard is already on it's way when you determine "what end-users want these days". Do not misunderstand :I fully agree that you are in the position where making up such decisions is necessary. For the end-users....
Like you say, there is another group. Those who use a hobby to think and to tinker outside standards. Those who like getting information and then go and discover their own way. There are several here around and indeed, I am among those.
So the info I give is not exclusively ment for you, so to speak.
To the point then, here is the simplest method if noone else turns up:
(for DOS 2.22 + 6116Ram, the final DOS from Opus)
10 OPEN# 4;"CODE": POINT# 4; 8248: REM enter CODE as keyword
20 PRINT #4; CHR$ 80;: REM note the semicolon !!!!!!
22 POINT# 4; 8250
24 PRINT #4; CHR$ (BIN 01001110);: REM semicolon !
30 CLOSE# 4
40 FORMAT 1;"diskname": REM (assuming a DS 80tr drive being drive 1)
(A ROM 2.22 is going your way in a minute. It features a steprate better suited for modern drives, and a Ramdisk for Spec128, and extended CLS and ERASE commands. You also could wait till the meeting in Maarssen, 17th of aug., then I could fix it for you. :-) )
@roko:
So FORMAT doesn't do an inquire?
After coldstart the disk tables in ROM are copied to RAM so RAM holds the default specifications (40 tr., 180Kb, etc). These default values are replaced by 'real' disk specs as soon as a disk is approached other than by FORMAT. The format command direct takes the specs from the RAM table if the chip is installed.
On many (most?) Opusses the RAM was not installed, so there also is a flag signalling the use of the ROM, or the RAM table. Opusses without RAM chip have to use the default ROM table anyway.
So that's why you need the 6116 chip to be able to format other than 180KB: the specs table stored in ram can't be modified, but in ram it can.
Roelof sent me some Opus Discovery disk image files and a Windows utility called 'Vimaging.exe' which can extract files from Opus Discovery disk image files.
After extracting I converted the .tap files that were created to mp3, and loaded the mp3 into a ZX Spectrum with real Opus Discovery using an mp3 player:
That worked great!
The First tool was a formatting utility from Helge Keller, but the code file was missing unfortunately, so I couldn't use that one.
However it showed some disk format specs by default for a double sided disk with over 80 tracks!
The second one was a tool from Axel Toepfer, and that one worked great!
First I thought: let's try to use the disk format specs from the other tool:
But that didn't work properly, probably the 11 sectors per track were invalid:
So I changed the configuration to that from a PlusD/Disciple/Sam Coupe disk:
And that workd 100%!!
I quickly created a BASIC program that saved 10K files, and it stopped at 80 files as expected:
So it's amazing that the Opus Discovery is this flexible: you can change disk format specs to any configuration you want, even more than default numbers of tracks etc.
When such a formatted disk is used, the Opus Discovery rom detects the format and uses it.
However that causes some problems: Roelof told me he still wants to upload some disk images to WoS, but it's hard to convert a disk image with a non-standard format.
Anyway, I'm very happy having learned such a lot about the Opus Discovery!
What a great invention!
And then to know the company (Opus Supplies) still exists!
Sorry, I might be delving too deep now :-). But I have good memories of those days...
do you know http://www.dubaron.com/diskimage/ ?
I use this program for a long time for example to get diskimages from my mb02+ compact flash cards. The program does bitwise reading without care about the disk configuration.
Greets Ingo.
Checking this prog will be on my list.
Talking about Compact Flash cards I find this one very usefull as it can handle my private soft-defined 'partitions'. (WinXP)
www.mikrocontroller.net/attachment/47409/SD_RAW.exe
The standard MOVE command won't work with different disk formats:
MOVE "d";1 TO "d";2
So I needed something else.
I found some copiers on disk but they simply didn't work or behaved very strangly.
So I continued my search and I found a simple but great working copy program that can be typed in by yourself.
I found it in a Discovery User Club magazine.
I'm a bit lazy, so here it is ;) :
I modified mu version a bit to copy disk to disk automatically.
So it is copying (and the Opus isn't fast), and I can do something else in the meantime ;)
I must say: it surprises me that there is almost nothing on WoS about the Opus Discovery.
There has been a large user community here in Holland, but it seems only a few of them (like Roelof) are on WoS to help with Opus issues.
Let's change that ;)
I have three of them (well, at this moment, as I will offer them for sale lateron) and often get requests from other owners about the PC drive upgrade, and for software.
http://benophetinternet.nl/hobby/vanmezelf/Upgrading%20your%20Opus%20Discovery%20with%20a%20PC%20drive.pdf
I have the feeling that there is more interest in this.
Pricing for an upgrade set follow later today.