DWEEBS - applications for DWLOAD - DriveWire

[pser1]

Hi Jon,
just finished the DosPlus4.9b tests ...
For simplicity I have used XRoar with the DosPlus49b ROM and Becker connexion.
The 'standard' disks 180k, 360k double sided and 720K have worked without problems.
The dreaded 360K single sided has given these results:
- Copying from floppy to VDK file (FLO2V) failed with an I/O Error the first time, but worked nicely next attempts (?)
- Copying back from VDK file to floppy (V2FLO) failed if the floppy had not been formatted exactly one side, 80 tracks, working OK when disks do match.
Maybe I could add this control for that 'ugly' case.
Can't undestand why this happens with DP49b ... I was sure all tests had worked flawlessly with DDOS4.1 (Eurohard) from Lafumat's controller on my D64

cheers
pere

[pser1]

I have taken a look at the V2FLO source, the one that has problems when the disks are not same geometry and have found it very easy to add that control.
So here you are the new 8.4 version with the source as well. Hope it will be the very last one

cheers
pere

[fridgemagnet]

Hi Pere,

*Finally* got round to trying this out on my newly re-assembled D64, all seems to work ok on my 40T/DS disks now so thanks for your efforts.

[pser1]

you are welcome.

I have decided to use DPlus49b - Dplus50 for my experiments using the DOS commands via Drivewire.
These ones have given me just a few problems compared to the DDOSnn that created lots of problems when applied to VDKs

I need to make many more tests, but by now there are 13 commands that work properly ...
These are in order of testing / implementatin:
DIR, FREE, DRIVE, LOF, LOAD, RUN, PROTECT, KILL, RENAME, COPY, SREAD, SWRITE, SAVE
The rest will be added to the list in the future

cheers
pere

[fridgemagnet]

Did I ever point you at my networking page?:

http://www.onastick.clara.co.uk/netwrks.htm

reason being is I re-implemented a lot of these commands to run over a network style connection (the assembler sources are there) & may be some useful for reference material.

[pser1]

Wow,
that's really very interesting!
I will need a lot of time to have a peek at it, but I will try to do as soon as possible.

As for today, I think (and hope) that my DPlus49b-DPlus50 interceptor works well ... all the commands including SAVE, COPY, BACKUP and even DSKINIT (the hardest one)
Will do some more tests with disks of different sizes (180, 360, 720 and the strange 360 single sided)
By now it is a dweeb that loads in the high RAM (previously switched to MAP1) and intercepts the DOS only at three points
More on that to come as tests are done ...

I think that now my CoCo-SDC begins to be of interest for my Dragon, I will have to investigate its possibilities

cheers
pere

[tormod]

By popular request (hello tjewell ), here is a simple CAS parser to load CAS files directly from the DriveWire server. It is just enough thrown together to have a proof of concept and it only reads machine language files. If you look at the sources, little effort was made to make it readable nor efficient, it is based on the DWLOAD code by replacing the DECB/etc parsing with a CAS parser equivalent to my cas2decb converter. To understand the code it is probably best to assemble it with the lwasm --list option to see which parts of the source file that are actually used.

To use it:

Code: Select all

DLOAD"CAS""MYFILE.CAS"

The N flag can be used to inhibit execution:

Code: Select all

DLOAD"CAS"N"MYFILE.CAS"

In addition to the normal dots printed for each DriveWire sector transfer (like DWLOAD) there are some diagnostics printed: A / for each new CAS block and \ in case of a data block. For a name block it will print the name in quotes. If the file ID is not machine language, it will print a B for BASIC or D for data, but will then probably fail later with "CAS PARSING FAILED".

I have included a DROIDS.CAS example which works very well. It is a game I typed in from a magazine back in the days, and a great application of semi-graphics. The CAS file was generated by XRoar.

CAS dweeb screenshot

dwload-cas.png (1.36 KiB) Viewed 10919 times

There are limitations to this approach for parsing CAS files, and CAS files with loading tricks and copy protection will likely fail. Additionally, doing it in a dweeb further puts some restrictions on where the CAS file content can be loaded. If the CAS dweeb fails, try the standalone cas2decb, or reassemble the dweeb to load at another location. The attached dweeb loads at $600 and is less than 512 bytes long.

[tjewell]

Hi all! I've just done a little tweak to Pere's LDAF dweeb, which allows you to load in an ASCII formatted basic file.

The original was designed to use DOS text files, and hence looked for 'carriage return/linefeed' pairs to mark the end of a line. Unix (linux, MacOs etc) only require a linefeed, so I've made a small change to allow it support both.