Comments on: Atom Lite CF support

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 14:25:51 +0000

It wouldn’t be much work to do it, though it’ll never be as fully functional as the Windows version. The FDRAWCMD interface support in the Linux kernel lacks the flexibility to terminate write commands early, since it’s not something people would normally need to do. That prevents writing CRC errors, short sectors, mixed density tracks, and a few other quirks required by copy protected disks.

That said, if you only want to read/write regular SAM and CP/M formats then you’ll be fine with the standard support:

To read from SAM disk to raw image:
dd if=/dev/fd0u800 of=image.mgt

To write the image back to a formatted disk:
dd if=image.mgt of=/dev/fd0u800

To format a new SAM disk:
fdformat /dev/fd0u800

If the /dev/fd0u800 device doesn’t exist, try /dev/.static/dev/fd0u800 instead. Or for CP/M disks change the last part of the name to fd0u720.

You’ll only be able to use .mgt (old-style 819200 byte .dsk images) with that method, but it might be better than nothing for now!

By: Steve(spt)

Steve(spt) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:30:29 +0000

Is there any chance of a version of
Samdisk for Linux?

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:42:30 +0000

Yes – AL+ DALLAS clock support was added last week, and confirmed over the weekend with Edwin’s updated BDOS.

I implemented DALLAS RAM saving to the .cfg file for the normal clock, but that wasn’t very convenient to view/edit. I’ll move that to an external file instead, with the AL clock saved to a different file.

SimCoupe currently emulates the DS1687, which has only 256 bytes of RAM. Once I get my AL+ I’ll implement the DS17887, which has a spacious 8K of RAM. That should give much more room to play with for state saving!

By: Steve(spt)

Steve(spt) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:26:01 +0000

Would Sim Coupe support the new Atom Lite+ using the Dallas clock? What do you have in mind? Could the uses also store bytes in the Dallas clocks RAM , if so could you save and load Dallas RAM as a file to and from your hard drive?

I normally use my Sam in mode 3, it would be nice to be able to store the screen mode, say in the Dallas clock on a real Sam so when it boots up you could read the last used screen mode and have it set to that. – just a thought!