Re: [hatari-devel] Floppy formatting support

[Nicolas Pomarède <npomarede@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 08/05/2019 à 23:31, Eero Tamminen a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> On 5/7/19 10:08 PM, Roger Burrows wrote:
> > On 7 May 2019 at 19:42, Miro Kropácek wrote:
> > > I apologise if this has been discussed before. How good is supposed 
> > > to be
> > > Hatari's floppy formatting support? I wanted to test something (as I 
> > > don't
> > > have a floppy drive in my Falcon anymore) and I'm getting errors 
> > > everywhere
> > > I look. :) The simplest use case was TOS 4.04 + newly created DD 
> > > image, it
> > > reports that the floppy disk may be write protected (isn't) or something
> > > else wrong with it.
> > IIRC, it's non-existent.  I'm pretty sure that I had to test on real 
> > hardware
> > when I added desktop floppy formatting to EmuTOS.  If you have 
> > something that
> > needs a real floppy, I can test it for you.
>
> The normal .ST, .MSA etc floppy formats don't include the information
> necessary for low level formatting.
>
> But I though that STX or IPF formats had support needed for formatting.
> They may need separate file for writes.  I didn't notice any mention
> of that in Manual.
>
> Nicolas?

Hi

I don't remember what is written in the doc or if it's clear enough (not 
at home, can't check at the moment), but the "Write Track" command is 
not implemented for ST/MSA, it will return an error.

For STX files, it's supported though, IIRC some thalion games 
(dragonflight maybe) need it to format the disk use to save in game 
progress.
In that case a .wd1172 file will be created and it will contain the 
content of the write track buffer for any written tracks (same for 
sectorrs in case some non standard sector size are used)

IPF had plan for a similar feature, but it was not implemented in 
capslibrary so far, so there's no point in doing this ourselves.

So, the trick if you want to low format a floppy disk image is to copy 
any .STX file you might have and name it for example "empty.stx". Then 
insert this floppy image using Hatari menu and you should be able to 
format it from desktop or any other program (fastcopy, ...). This will 
create an additional file "empty.wd1172".

Nicolas