my CP/M-80 pile'o'gunk

[Tom Jennings]

On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Eric Smith wrote:

> Some PC floppy controllers can handle single density (FM) and others
> can't.  All can handle double density (MFM).  I was lucky with both
> motherboards I've used for this, an Asus P2B-F (Pentium 2/3 slot 1) and
> an Asus A7M266-D (dual Athlon).

Cool! My big (sic) home linux box is a 1998-vintage Asus board,
might even be a P2B variant.

> It's easy to get them working in Linux.  You just need an appropriate
> cable.  

I can RTFM, but is this a handwired cable? Is there any vestigial
correspondence between floppy pinouts (3.5, 5.25. 8)?!

> If you just want a "raw" image, you can use the setfdprm utility
> (from the util-linux or fdutils packages) to set the parameters (bytes
> per sector, etc.).  Then you can dd the contents of the floppy to a file.

I figured decoding CPM disks is pretty much done, and trivial
if I gotta cobble it up. I'll do it in Perl!


> I archive the contents of 8-inch disks into DMK format using a
> program I wrote called rfloppy, which is part of my dmklib package:
>     http://dmklib.brouhaha.com/
> It automatically figures out the characteristics of the floppy.

WIll go look at tonight!