Installing an operating system on the 11/83 - update.

[Paul Koning]

> On Feb 22, 2022, at 7:33 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> From the FDC point of view, which doesn't have optical view of the drive and media, the 80 track DD 5.25" looks similar to a "720K 3.5" drive.
> (80 tracks, 9 sectors per track, 300 RPM, 250K data transgfer rate)
> 
> On SOME PCs, setting the CMOS floppy setting to "720K" may take care of it.

Originally I wrote my RX50 floppies on a Windows PC.  The drive was a plain old 5.25 inch PC drive, normally used for 9 sector per track PC floppies.  It turns out some BIOS operations will reset it to 10 sectors, which is RX50 format, and then BIOS int13 operations can read and write it.  I coded up support for that in RSTSFLX, which can be found on my Subversion server (in branches/V2.6).  The original version was built with Borland C++, but I switched to DJGPP which made all that much easier.  No CMOS or other magic needed, just an application that knows how to speak int13.  And of course an old enough Windows, or plain DOS, which allows you to do those operations.

Subsequently I moved all this to Linux.  There is (was?) a tool -- fdparm? -- that you could use to tweak the floppy layout settings.  A simple entry in its config file would give the RX50 layout.  Then it's just a matter of handling the sector interleaving, track skew, and odd track numbering.  With just a few more lines of code, the application can handle the parameter setting so no prior setup is needed, which is what I ended up doing in RSTSFLX (in C).  The latest version does this as well, but in Python.

So as far as I can see, all this stuff is perfectly easy if you just use a plain ordinary floppy drive.

	paul