15 May
2005
15 May
'05
1:40 p.m.
Some disk formats are completely incompatible with
standard PC hardware
(such as Altair hard sectored disks).
Yes, but provided the file format is docuemnted, there's always a
possibility womebody can make the special hardware, or use the target
machine to write the disk (with the data sent, say, over an RS232 link).
Some disk formats are incompatible with some PC hardware, most PC's do not
support FM - Single Density, some systems used formats that were specific to
WD controllers and not compatible to the NEC (and NEC clones) used by PC's.
For formats compatible with PC controllers there is a utility called
teledisk that is commonly used to backup/restore. Anadisk is another tool
that can extract the data.
I would strongly discourage the use of Teledisk for this. The file format
is proprietary, and although there have been some attempts to
reverse-engineer it, AFAIK the full details aren't know (particularly of
Teledisk compressed files). If you use Teledisk, you _have_ to use an
MS-DOS PC to re-write the data to a physical disk (and a PC with the
appropriate type of floppy drive), you _have_ to get Teledisk (last time
I checked, it wasn't free, it was shareware, but you could no longer
register it...). etc. If your PC can't write FM formats, then you're
stuck (even if you've got 100 machines that _can_ write such formats, and
which can get data from a PC disk or similar).
Any such archive must be made as accessible as possible, and that means
using documented file formats. To be honest, I'd rather have to write my
own software than do battle with a proprietary PC program.
-tony