Archiving Software

Yeah ... this is a big problem... "I really wish I could get my classic system up and running. I've spend three years and hundreds of dollars on restoring it, and it's ready to go. Hours with the soldering iron, digging up technical details and lengthy hardware debugging sessions and if's finally ready! - but I can't find a boot disk. There is this stuipid ImageDisk thing, but I can't get it to work on my non-standard setup. As far as I can tell, I would have to temporarily move a drive cable and rejumper a drive in order to make the image into a bootable disk. What a bummer to have come so far and be completely stopped by an inconsiderate author who gave us such crappy free software and didn't even care enough to spend more of his money and time in recreating my non-standard setup and maintaining the software to work on it. Oh I wish I could somehow make a boot disk without having to move that cable and jumper - So many years of work have been spent and it looks like I'll never see that system run." Or is there a reason why your 8" and 5.25" 48TPI disks can't be run at the standard PC drive A: and B: positions? Because 4 FDDs on one controller is not a standard PC configuration. Does your controller use the internal drive select register of the 765? Does it have an external hardware register like the 2-drive select register of the PC, and if so what is the layout and will it be the same on different 4-drive controllers. Why does your controller have two connectors (there are four drive selects already on the cable). The primary reason ImageDisk doesn't support this, and dual controllers is because I don't have this setup and would be unable to test it. You are the first to ask for dual controllers (ok, you didn't really ask) - I don't think this is all that common a setup, and most people will find it easier to just hook up the required drive long enough to make the images that you need. (I provide details on my site on how to set up a nice external drive cable). I do apologize for burdening you with this. However the image file format is documented, and you are free to write your own compatible program (or do like Tony suggests and hold me responsible for your "having" to create yet another image file format). I would spend many hours helping people understand it, explaining why it doesn't compile with their favorite compiler or be easily made to run on their favorite system, and helping them implement features I decided not to implement in the first place. Then I would get lots of feedback about what I had done wrong and see posting about how "better" versions are now being maintained at site xxx. And if it goes like some of my earlier projects to which I released source code, I will eventually find other and even commercial tools which are based on my code (This happened in at least two cases with the C compiler). I used to release source code to nearly all of my stuff, but not any more. I just don't need the hassles. I have no commercial goals for Imagedisk, and I will be happy to give out the source code under NDA, however I am not yet ready to make it generally available. Regards, Dave -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html