Read Flex disks on a PC ?

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RoyCoates
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Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by RoyCoates »

Hi All. A long long time ago, I had a program which would allow me to read Flex disks on a PC. It would have been DOS back then of course.

Anyone know of a way to read them with a modern machine? I've retained a couple of PC 5.25" drives for jobs such as this - would be nice to get my old files back.

Cheers,

Roy.
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rolfmichelsen
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Re: Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by rolfmichelsen »

Roy,

There's some information about dumping disks to the various virtual disk formats here. Then you can read the disks using one of the emulators.

I personally found it easier to read my floppies on my old Dragon and wrote a small program a while back to dump the disks over the Dragon 64 serial port to be captured on the receiving end and stored as a virtual diskette. That program can be found here

Welcome to the forums.

-- Rolf
RoyCoates
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Joined: Fri Apr 08, 2011 2:43 pm

Re: Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by RoyCoates »

Many thanks Rolf - I'll certainly explore that option.

My 'main' machine is a 64 with the Compusense Dragon Plus on it. All re-housed in a 19" rack cabinet. It's been so long though, I wonder if it will even power up!

Looking forward to digging it all out over Easter.

Cheers!

Roy.
prime
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Re: Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by prime »

RoyCoates wrote:Many thanks Rolf - I'll certainly explore that option.

My 'main' machine is a 64 with the Compusense Dragon Plus on it. All re-housed in a 19" rack cabinet. It's been so long though, I wonder if it will even power up!

Looking forward to digging it all out over Easter.
Ohhh a second Dragon Plus board, hopefully a working one.....I currently have Simon's (admin) DragonPlus board, which seems to have a faulty prom (82s147) on it, would
be great if we could get a good dump of that prom.

Are you the same Roy Coates that did the Dragon versions of Manic Miner / Jet Set Willy ?

Cheers.

Phill.
RoyCoates
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Re: Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by RoyCoates »

prime wrote:Ohhh a second Dragon Plus board, hopefully a working one....
Well that remains to be seen.
prime wrote:it would be great if we could get a good dump of that prom.
If you have a reader, I don't see why not.
prime wrote:Are you the same Roy Coates that did the Dragon versions of Manic Miner / Jet Set Willy ?
Yeah, that was me. But then I get the blame for a lot of other things too!

Cheers,

Roy.
admin
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Re: Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by admin »

Roy,

Two methods of dumping Dragon disks using a PC:

1. Using an older PC that can support a 5.25" drive as B: (720KB) and an MS-DOS boot disk with VCOPY.EXE copied to it (VCOPY.EXE can be downloaded from this site). Simply connect up the drive, configure the BIOS to set it as B: and 720 (360 if the BIOS has that option) and boot into MS-DOS. Use VCOPY to create a VDK image of the disk in B:

The above method works 90% of the time - but sometimes VCOPY will complain about the disk and will refuse to image it :-(

2. Using Linux (Older distributions are better here as modern ones have removed the FDPARM function). This needs a little knowledge of Linux, but effectively using the FDPARM command to tell Linux how the disk format is layed out and the using DD to create an image of the disk.

If you get really stuck and want to risk letting one of the UK guys on here dump them for you then I'm sure there will be offers. Likewise if you can help "Prime" with the Dragon Plus board I would be personally very greatful (its my board thats dead) - we need to get a dump of the prom so we can replicate it.

Do you still have the TRS-80 in your attic - I seem to remember that had the original source code for Manic Miner on it......?
Simon Hardy
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robcfg
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Re: Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by robcfg »

Have you tried omniflop?
RoyCoates
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Re: Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by RoyCoates »

admin wrote:Two methods of dumping Dragon disks using a PC:
The linux option looks useful, don't know why I didn't think of that!
admin wrote:Likewise if you can help "Prime" with the Dragon Plus board I would be personally very greatful (its my board thats dead) - we need to get a dump of the prom so we can replicate it.
If the sucker powers up, you are welcome to borrow it.
admin wrote:Do you still have the TRS-80 in your attic - I seem to remember that had the original source code for Manic Miner on it......?
I wrote Jetset Willy on the Flex system, and I know I still have a hard copy listing of that too - it's enormous!
I can't for the life of me remember what I used to write Manic Miner. I know I had access to floppy drives so that would have eaten up the cartridge port.
It's all so so long ago now and I've got a crap memory at the best of times! I've also written one or two other programs since then ;)
I need to get in the attic and have a good rummage.

Cheers,

Roy.
RoyCoates
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Re: Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by RoyCoates »

A brief aside: Wrt the TRS-80, what a lot of people didn't realise was that there was no access to Mathew's Model 4 or to the original Speccy code.

Both MM and JSW were written by playing/studying the spectrum version and then writing code to mimic what I saw. Graphics were generated by pausing the game, counting pixels, hand-converting (binary) pixels to byte values - and hand coding them in. It was horribly tedious and yet exciting at the same time.

I think each game took about 3 months of very long work-days.
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rolfmichelsen
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Re: Read Flex disks on a PC ?

Post by rolfmichelsen »

RoyCoates wrote:Both MM and JSW were written by playing/studying the spectrum version and then writing code to mimic what I saw
Now, this is impressive :D

-- Rolf
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