Re: [hatari-devel] Floppy formatting support

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Hi,

I added separate Floppy formatting section to the Hatari manual.


	- Eero

On 5/9/19 7:39 PM, Nicolas Pomarède wrote:
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









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