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Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 10 Jan 2024 19:25
by rubber_jonnie
Good Stuff!!!
Can I buy one from you please :)
Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 10 Jan 2024 19:41
by stephen_usher
Hehe. I could send you a PCB and hints how to put it together seeing as there are bodges.
Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 10 Jan 2024 21:41
by PhilC
Great to see you’ve got it up and running @stephen_usher
Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 10 Jan 2024 21:54
by 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! :lol:
Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 10 Jan 2024 23:15
by rubber_jonnie
stephen_usher wrote: 10 Jan 2024 19:41
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 :)
Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 10 Jan 2024 23:18
by stephen_usher
I'll see what I can do. :-)
Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 12 Jan 2024 14:38
by 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.
Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 13 Jan 2024 12:39
by 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.
Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 13 Jan 2024 14:08
by 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.
Re: General Stuff(tm)
Posted: 14 Jan 2024 17:02
by 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
And the ST reading the OPD formatted floppy.
IMG_3535.jpeg
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.