General Stuff(tm)

[rubber_jonnie]

Good Stuff!!!

Can I buy one from you please

[stephen_usher]

Hehe. I could send you a PCB and hints how to put it together seeing as there are bodges.

[PhilC]

Great to see you’ve got it up and running @stephen_usher

[stephen_usher]

Seeing as the floppy format is supposed to be FAT12 (but with a non-IBM boot sector) I tried reading one in the Mega ST as I had it to hand... Two bombs and reboot!

[rubber_jonnie]

Hehe. I could send you a PCB and hints how to put it together seeing as there are bodges.

I'd be up for that

[stephen_usher]

I'll see what I can do.

[stephen_usher]

I wrote a program to change the Boot Parameter Block on the disk image written by the C1 interface to a standard MSDOS one.

Somehow I think the FAT12 filesystem isn't written correctly:

Code: Select all

[root@nowhere opd]# mount -t msdos /dev/loop0 /mnt
[root@nowhere opd]# ls /mnt
ls: cannot access '/mnt/myfile.doc': No such file or directory
dr240110.181*  dr240110.181*  dr240110.182*  myfile.doc
[root@nowhere opd]# ls -al /mnt
ls: cannot access '/mnt/myfile.doc': No such file or directory
total 13
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 3584 Jan  1  1970 ./
drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 4096 Sep 13  2022 ../
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 1024 Jan 10 18:11 dr240110.181*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 1024 Jan 10 18:11 dr240110.181*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 3072 Jan 10 18:20 dr240110.182*
-?????????  ? ?    ?       ?            ? myfile.doc

P.S. program attached.

[stephen_usher]

The Mega ST is up to 4MB now as the RAM from Exxos arrived yesterday.

I've also been able to do a bit more testing with the OPD floppy system.

It looks like the floppy image I was using for testing was corrupt. This may have been because the version of FlashFloppy on the Gotek was old or because the FF.CFG file had pin 34 set to being chg rather than ready.

Anyway, I re-formatted the virtual disk and wrote data onto it. Now converting the boot block to MSDOS allows it to be successfully mount in DOSBox but typing test.doc seems to show the contents of the profile file instead.

P.S. Using the converted image on the OPD still works, suggesting the firmware doesn't check the boot block at all.

[stephen_usher]

I managed to write the dos converted image to a double density floppy.

Windows 10 can't read it.

However, the Atari ST can and it can access the files too.

Seems that test.doc is actually correct, it's just a memory dump by Quill so it contained uncleared data from memory which included the dial-up profile entry.

[stephen_usher]

A combination of myself (finding out that the Computer One OPD floppy interface blindly writes a string held in the ROM to the boot sector) along with Jobdone (from the QL Forum & Discord, who found the correct BPB parameters and hex edited the ROM) have got the One Per Desk now formatting floppies that the ST and MSDOS can reliably read and write to.

This should facilitate the use of more able machines to create content for the OPD to use/run.

Here's a text file copied onto an OPD formatted floppy and then imported into the Quill word processor.

IMG_3536.jpeg (237.61 KiB) Viewed 1059 times

And the ST reading the OPD formatted floppy.

IMG_3535.jpeg (249.03 KiB) Viewed 1059 times

Good progress, though I've not done a number of things I planned to today. But I did manage to fit new "rubber" feet on the Mega ST after scraping out the hardened remains of the originals.