Interest in a DiscFerret?

On Thu, 10 Jan 2019, Guy Dunphy via cctalk wrote: A couple of questions to discuss. Believe it or not, they are not rhetorical questions. 1) Do you like to re-invent the wheel? You CAN make a better one, and have fun doing it. 2) Do you want to image the disks, for later recreation of a duplicate disk? OR 3) Do you want to extract FILES? (to be viewed/edited/used on PC) The majority of the flux-transition products were developed around #2. I don't know which, if any, ever completed the software for #3. #2 and #3 are actually not mutually incompatible. If you make images of the raw content of the disks, you could work from those images, rather than from the physical format on the disks themselves for extracting files. That is especially an issue for formats such as Apple2, which can not be read by stock PC hardware. And, if you succeed in creating a 140K file of the bytes on an Apple disk, then you do not need to worry about whether it will survive any more read attempts. For example, David Small's "Magic Sac" Macintosh emulator originally used MFM images of Macintosh GCR disks. Not his first choice for a name for it, but that was as close as Apple's lawyers would let him get. Later, he created "Spectre GCR" to be able to read the Mac GCR disks. If you can image the Apple disks, so that you can wade through the raw content on a PC, the details of the raw physical format, the logical format, and the file system are documented. MOST of that is present in "Beneath Apple DOS". With the GCR structure (they changed it between DOS 3.2 and 3.3) you can convert, and extract the bytes, to get 13 or 16 256 byte sectors per track. You then need to look at the data structures of the Directory (track 17?) to figure out which sectors comprise each file. Apple DOS, PRO-DOS, P-System, and Apple CP/M each have different data structures for their directories. About 30 years ago, I wrote the software to extract and copy files from those formats on Apple disks, using a board [made by somebody else] in a PC. ("Apple Turnover", later just "Turnover" when Apple's lawyers spoke up). The publisher and vendor of the product screwed both of us. The majority, but far from all, of the other formats use MFM, with a track structure that is compatible with the NEC and WD track format. Most, but not all of those can be done using PC hardware. (Some, such as FM/"Single Density" and 128 bytes per sector, can be done on some PCs and not others) Apple's GCR (it is NOT MFM) is different between AppleDos 3.2 and 3.3, and is different from the GCR used by Commodore, Sirius/Victor, and some others. Some file system data structures, such as CP/M, TRS-DOS, P-system are documented. Some are not. Some claim to be documented, by telling you sectors per track, bytes per sector, and what track the dirctory is on, but not the data structures of it. Oh, yes. and, . . . 4) You will need to write additional code to work with the content of those files if you want to load word processor or spreadsheet files into any of the "modern" office programs. Word processors, even Wordstar, did NOT store the documents as ASCII text. I wrote XenoCopy, but it is NOT STILL AVAILABLE and I got out of that aspect a few decades ago, so I remember some details, but not all of the really important ones. At the time, I estimated that there were about 2500 different floppy disk formats, and I implemented 400 of them. Chuck did 22Disk (Sydex). He seems to have stayed involved, had greater mastery, and remembers much more than I do. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com http://www.xenosoft.com