File2VDK anyone?

A place to discuss everything Dragon related that doesn't fall into the other categories.
tjewell
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Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by tjewell »

I guess I had it in my head that VDK and DSK files weren't that much different, from my dealings with the CocoSDC, so I thought that if we just tweaked the toolshed code to ignore the header, it might work with VDKs too. And perhaps it might - although I suspect things might be more complicated. I think I'll have a play - convert some VDKs to DSKs using Pere's tools, and see what the toolshed code thinks of it!

Thanks all!

Edit: It doesn't like them at all - and reading back over the replies to my original question, it looks like there's core differences in the format, so I shouldn't be surprised. Ah well!
pser1
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Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by pser1 »

Hi Tony,
keep into acount that RSDOS and Dragon DOS or DosPlus are absolutely incompatible.
I am sure that it is possible to pass info (programs) from one format to the other,
but as we all know, a program working on one of them could simply crash on the
other ... so, could you explain a bit what you are trying to do?
Just to imagine a way to make the conversion.

cheers
pere
tjewell
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Location: Cambridge, England

Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by tjewell »

Ah, apologies, I'm confusing actual disk formats with the techniques used for making images of them. So just because I can read a DSK file of a Dragon Dos disk, doesn't mean I can read a DSK file of an RSDOS one. Excuse my ageing brain! :)

In an ideal world, I would love to manipulate a Dragon disk image like I might manipulate a ZIP archive, from the command line. Let's say I had a program that could do that, called 'vdk', then I would be able to do:

vdk dir mydisk.vdk (tells me what's inside mydisk.vdk)
vdk add mydisk.vdk HELLO.BAS (to add a file to the disk)
vdk extract mydisk.vdk GAME.BIN (extracts a file from the disk)
... etc ...

Why do I want this? Sometimes I'd just like to see what's on a disk without firing up Xroar, or I'd like a script to build a disk (for example, automating the build of disks we were doing for the DosPlus extension, or getting all the Orchestra files onto disks etc). I guess I'm just old-school and don't always want (or can't) fire up a UI to do things like this!

Anyway, this isn't something I'm desperate for, but if something like this exists and I've just missed it, I'd love to know!

Cheers, Tony
pser1
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Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by pser1 »

Hi Tony,
no worries ...
What you are asking for, already exists, just search for:
"Dragon DOS v0.5.1.0 snapshot g97c720b"
or something like "DragonTools" both by Rolf Michelsen.
The only 'con' for you is that they work on an OLD DOS window,
probably only worth for windows users, sorry.

Maybe other users know of different utilities that could be used
to manage VDK images right from the command line.
You are welcome to comment here on that subject.

cheers
pere
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rolfmichelsen
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Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by rolfmichelsen »

I was recently made aware that the DragonTools snapshot mentioned earlier in this thread is no longer available. I built a somewhat more recent snapshot that I'm attaching here if anybody out there find these tools, including a DragonTools version of File2VDK, of any use. Source and additional material can always be found in the git repository. Unfortunately, I haven't been doing anything with these tools for a while due to some serious constraints on spare time... Who knows, maybe that will change one day.

-- Rolf
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DragonTools-snapshot-g9f71f12.zip
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Bosco
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Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by Bosco »

Great stuff! Thanks Rolf. :D

I for one find these tools useful and I know others will too.
tjewell
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Location: Cambridge, England

Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by tjewell »

Nearly two years on, and I'm eventually getting round to playing with this! But I'm getting stuck too. I can pull basic files off a disk no problem (and the -ascii option is super handy!), but the binary files aren't recognised by Xroar - it just says "Unknown binary file type". I'm sure I'm missing something obvious - it's a while since I've played with Xroar - but I can't see it. What have I missed?

Thanks, Tony
pser1
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Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by pser1 »

tjewell wrote:Nearly two years on, and I'm eventually getting round to playing with this! But I'm getting stuck too. I can pull basic files off a disk no problem (and the -ascii option is super handy!), but the binary files aren't recognised by Xroar - it just says "Unknown binary file type". I'm sure I'm missing something obvious - it's a while since I've played with Xroar - but I can't see it. What have I missed?
Thanks, Tony
Hi Tony,
have you verified that the binary files do have a correct header? For the Dragon it should be:
1 byte $55
1 byte $02 for Binary ($01 for basic)
2 bytes for Load address
2 bytes for file Length
2 bytes for Execution address
1 byte $AA
cheers
pere
tjewell
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Location: Cambridge, England

Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by tjewell »

Hi Pere!

The binary files I'm pulling off disks don't seem to have that header structure - but then again, neither do any of the other BIN files I have on my system. I found this conversation from, gosh, nearly 10 years ago with Sixxie - viewtopic.php?f=5&t=275#p1644 - where he says to use Coco bin files, which is what I've been doing. But I might be going off a tangent here! :)

So a simple example ... I've got "FlagonBird_1.1.vdk" from the archive, and it's got just FLAGON.BIN on it. I'd like to extract FLAGON.BIN and run it directly in Xroar. Maybe this isn't the best way to do it! I can run 'DragonDos.exe read "FlagonBird_1.1.vdk" FLAGON.BIN", get the BIN file, but I can't work out how to run it.

I also note that if I do a FILE2VDK.exe FLAGON.BIN, and mount the FLAGON.BIN.vdk, I can do a DIR and see FLAGON.BIN, but when I try and run it, I'm getting an FM error.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong? And maybe there's a better way to do this? I'd just like to pull a binary file off a disk, have a look at it, maybe poke it with a Hex Editor and run it.

(Also, what's the best route for disassemblers and assemblers at the moment - for a long time I used Sixxie's perl scripts, but I'm guessing LWTOOLs is better?)

Cheers,
Tony
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Bosco
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Re: File2VDK anyone?

Post by Bosco »

Hi Tony.

I've only ever used LWASM, mainly because asm6809 wasn't available for Windows when I got back into the hobby.

LWASM allows you to have alpha-numeric local labels which I quite like for readability. It also offers features like auto-branch length, cycle counting in listings and can be used to write 0S-09 modules (I believe).

LWASM doesn't output DragonDOS binaries though whereas asm6809 will output both DragonDos and DECB. For this reason alone I often consider migrating to asm6809 but can't quite let go of some of the above features. :D

For debugging and poking around in memory I use MAME's debugger.
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