16 Mar
2012
16 Mar
'12
9:58 p.m.
On another mailing list that I am on, someone was
expressing the
desire to retrieve data off some old BBC Micro floppies to see if it
would be possible to get some of the software running on a Raspberry
Pi. They do not own any machine with a floppy interface.
My BBC's don't have drives, and I don't have any software disks - so I
don't have a way to test this ... but ...
According to the all-knowing google, the BBC disk system used an
Intel 8271 and later an WD 177x controller - the 8271 does IBM 3740,
and the WD is certainly capable of it (so hopefully they kept the
format the same).
Correct. IRIC, Acorn DFS used single-density (FM) format and yes, the
format was identical no matter which disk controlelr you had. I am pretty
sure there were double-density systems for the 1770, biut the standard
was single-density.
Not only was the foramt the same, but there was a systme call to send
commands to the disk controlelr. These were the raw commens fro the 8271
chip. If oyu had a 1770, the software automattically translatted them
into the approrpate 1770 commands, so that copy-prorection schemes that
talked to the disk cotnrolelr via this call would still work.
So it seems to me that there is a reasonable chance
that these disks
could be read with ImageDisk - granted he'll need a DOS/floppy capable
PC (or a friend with one), but it might be worth a try.
I so no reason why not, if you have a PC that can handle single density
disks (a lot can;'t). I do know that the 1793-based controller in the
TRS-80 Model 3/4 can read them, there was a commerical program available
to do just that. There was nothing really odd about the BBC format AFAIK.
-tony