Re: [hatari-devel] Floppy formatting support

[Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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