1 Sep
2012
1 Sep
'12
11:48 a.m.
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>wrote:
I worte soemthing I called 'PERQDISK' in Turbo Pascal (shows how long ago
it was) under MS-DOS to read (and write) Interchange floppies. I think
it on;y does double desnity ones, but it woudl be easy enough to modify
(but the PC I ran it on had a disk controller that didn't correctly
handle single density).
I can let you (or anyone else) have a copy. At the time I wrote it, I'd
neer come across the GPL (!), so I said that I was keeping the copyright,
but that 'PERQ fanatics) could freely copy and use it. What I meant by
that was that if you use it to make a million dollars (pounds, euros), I
feel I am entitled to something. If you are restoring PERQs, then that's
fine, I want PERQs to be restored. BTW, writing PERQ emulators, archinve
software in general, etc, all counts as being a PERQ fanatic here :-))
-tony
It is a normal controlelr using normal data rates, and the drive is a
standard SA850. You shouldn't have any problems reading the disks. Making
sense of the data is another matter. The PERQ file system is not
simple...
I've written a utility (in C#) that can read, navigate, and copy files
from POS filesystem images, both for hard disk images (of 12 or
24-mb SA4000s currently, since I have no images of other drive types) and
floppy disk images. Someday I'll add write support, since it'd be very
useful for use with PERQemu. It should be pretty trivial to port to
whatever language your preference is (or it can run under Mono on Unices.)
It does not support RT-11 interchange format disks (yet), but that may be
better supported by another utility already out there.