4 ms·
The problem is a lot of the age machines (Apple II in particular) had a lot of direct control over the disk hardware. So they could move the head in "half trac
by jmount 11y ago
The problem is a lot of the age machines (Apple II in particular) had a lot of direct control over the disk hardware. So they could move the head in "half track" increments (reading from positions that potentially interfere with standard disk positions) and it is uncertain what on the physical disk is the intended image without somewhat knowing how the drive head is scheduled to move. Obviously something more sophisticated than a drive of the time could image the whole floppy (and one could simulate a drive over that)- but using a drive of the time isn't enough to make usable images in all cases. I think the software that tried to do so were called "nibblers" or "nibble editors", but it has been a long time.
- MagerValp 11y agoThis is actually not a problem today, see e.g. the ipf image format and hardware such as KryoFlux: http://info-coach.fr/atari/documents/_mydoc/IPF-Documentation.pdf http://info-coach.fr/atari/documents/_mydoc/IPF-Documentatio... http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_Disks http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_D...
- JoshTriplett 11y ago"Under MAME license" is unfortunately a showstopper for FOSS. Particularly unfortunate because MAME itself has started the process of moving away from that license and towards a FOSS license (see https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/README.md#license https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/README.md#licens...). Do you know if the authors of that code would consider releasing it under a FOSS-compatible license (e.g. MIT, LGPL, or GPL, depending on preferences about copyleft)? Failing that, do you know if a FOSS library exists to read and write the IPF image format?
- jmount 11y agoNeat. I knew a superior drive could copy everything, I didn't know this had become common.