On Fri, May 17, 2024 at 12:05:21AM -0400, Douglas Crawford via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Hey folks-
Its been a year and a half that I wanted the museum to be able to create and recreate the diskette media we use in the museum at will.
By now I thought things had developed that one system would be able to make any media we wanted, and would surely have a simple GUI interface that museum volunteers without a degree in magnetics. I'm not talking about fancy data recovery- just make disks from images from the web and capture working diskettes we already have.
I think we have two problems. One is no one person will know about all formats and tools. The second is I suspect that there still isn't the one disk imager that will do everything. Haven't been following that much recently but in the past there were a number of competing hardware solutions and each supported a subset of formats. Writing images was also not the primary target so support was spotty. May want to make a web page/document with what formats you wish to support and what hardware you have. Then ask the group who knows how to write a disk in one of the A formats with B hardware & software. If you know please provide step by step instructions and if possible demonstrate with VCF setup. I don't know if you have the image files to provide for people to test with or you also need instructions to image a disk to create an image file to then write a copy. You can then say who knows how to write A format using other tools and decide if its worth another tool to support. Suspect only way this is going to work is if a bunch of people can provide the the area they are familiar with. Don't know what percent of the formats you want we have people who have done without using period hardware. I use IMD, KryoFlux, and original hardware for making floppy images so that's all I can help with. MFM hard drives my real expert area.
IMD only for DEC robin? Not sure.
IMD is limited to what a PC disk controller can support. If you pick the right PC you can do FM also for 8" floppies with proper adapters. I have done this so can support you on this. A lot of later systems that use normal floppy controller chips IMD can write. When systems did their own thing like Apple it can't.
Right now the only way I know I can make a TRS-80 disk today is on a DOS machine running the TRS emulator which can mount real drives under the emulator. Yet another system to set up and support in the museum?
If a normal DOS PC can write TRS-80 floppies I would suspect you can then image that disk with IMD to be able to write more copies easier but don't really know. Possibly some software could convert image to IMD. This is where you need a TRS-80 person who knows more.
I thought these new imaging systems would be a dream, but I had a lot more success with the old IMD system. They are all great developments, I'm not taking anything away from them, but they weren't really conceived with our use case. It seems they solve specific areas of media problems that were of interest to their creators.
Yup, these tend to be people scratching their own itch. Trying to support everything is a lot of work. People are still finding new MFM hard drive formats after 10 years for my project. Fancy interfaces are a lot of work and no two people will agree on what is best anyway.