Catweasel (MK3) floppy controller question..

If you give testhist one more argument (a filename), it will dump the Catweasel's sample buffer to that file. That's a flux-transition level image. I don't have anything that will write such an image directly back to a disk, though. You could write a program to do it by removing most of the guts from dmk2cw. However, I don't know how readable such a disk would be. I don't really trust a process that doesn't include decoding the data, doing retries if it has a bad CRC, manually trying read-postcompensation (-o flag to cw2dmk) if that still doesn't work, and writing the data back with write-precompensation. If this data is just MFM in an IBM/ISO-style format at a higher clock rate, you probably can read it with cw2dmk by playing with enough of its options. You'll need -1 and -2 to set lower thresholds between short, medium, and long intervals (they should be about halfway between the peaks that testhist gives you), and -l to make the DMK track length twice as long as for a 1.2 MB disk. You may need to play with -o too, especially if you can read lower track numbers but higher ones keep getting CRC errors. I'd also suggest using the highest (28.322 MHz) Catweasel clock rate for these disks, seeing that you have a MK3. (The MK1 doesn't support this rate.) You'll need to give 4 as the clock rate to testhist to get a new set of peaks, and then give the -c 4 option to cw2dmk. There's still not a way to write this image back, though, as dmk2cw doesn't offer enough control from the command line. After you find a set of parameters that work in cw2dmk, define a new kind_desc in kind.h and recompile. You can then write disks that use these parameters with dmk2cw, and more conveniently read them in cw2dmk using one -k option instead of all the individual options I listed above. Feel free to email me if you need more help. -- Tim Mann tim at tim-mann.org http://tim-mann.org/