18 May
2023
18 May
'23
7:01 p.m.
My advice: buy an old desktop computer. Buy a standard PC floppy drive (a dual drive if
possible to give both 3.5 and 5.25 support). Then run Linux, use the "fdparm"
tool to set the media format if necessary, and copy the image with "dd".
Roughly speaking this is how I read and write RX50 floppies. More precisely, I usually
do it with my "rstsflx" tool, which (a) understands RSTS file systems so I can
manipulate things at that level, and (b) knows about RX50 interleaving and how to issue
the ioctl that sets 10 sector per track format.
paul
My views exactly.
I’ve had great experiences with a PIII Dell GX1. I’m most comfortable in a Windows
enviroment, and have found both PUTR, for DOS, and Omniflop for Windows NT, to be
perfectly suitable for writing disk images. PUTR is mainly for DEC
As for loading in/loading out files from images, there’s likely at least something out
there you can make use of. Even if there’s no host OS native software for writing directly
to images, there’s almost certainly an emulator, which would work off disk images that can
later be written to real hardware disks.
Ultimately, there are ways and means to do this, but ultimately an older PC with a real
floppy controller is by large the easiest way.
Josh