22 Oct
2007
22 Oct
'07
1:54 a.m.
On Sunday 21 October 2007 11:26:04 Ethan Dicks wrote:
I'll be curious to hear about any future progress. I, too, have a
Mirage, and a box of sample disks, but I don't know if I have any
utility disks.
If you grab the SQ80 utilities from www.buchty.net then you can adapt them to
read the Mirage's single-sided disks (it's just a case of commenting out the
bit that toggles the "side select" and making it not loop over side 0/side
1/) and get usable images. I haven't tried writing them back to formatted
disks yet.
There is an application that runs under DOS that will format SQ80 disks, which
work just fine in the Mirage - it will cheerfully ignore side 1, even though
many of them have DSDD drives - but it's a PITA to find a machine to install
DOS on just for one thing. It must be possible, therefore, to format the
disks on a PC controller. I know the Mirage uses a WD1772 controller.
I suspect that the formatter needs to write some "magic bits" to the directory
block before the Mirage will actually talk to the disk. Using the Geibler
utility I can format a disk but I need to write an image to it before I can
save anything.
Gordon