Archival Floppy Disk Preservation and Use
Added 2024-02-23 01:13:08 +0000 UTCHello!
This is a big video, I've been working to this one really since I got the S-100 computers in 2022 but it really kicked up a gear when I get the HP Series 200 machine and had to deal with the TD0 files the HP Museum had for it. Floppy disks vary in how they hold data for different systems, but only to a point. When it comes down to it, there are some common rules you can rely on that makes it easy to work with them if you come at it from the right perspective. This video is all about giving you that perspective to approach floppy disk imaging, and writing, in a way that makes it much easier to adapt to new an unusual formats.
I also did something different for this topic because I don't think something like this is best served by making a video. And I'm also working on making this into a page on my personal wiki for the channel and my work https://wiki.techtangents.net/wiki/Floppy_Disk_Imaging (this falls outside of the scope of caps.wiki for sure). I worked on that page and the script at the same time and only split them apart at the very end. So it still reads a little odd, I'll be going back to it later to make some tweaks to make it stand alone better.
Video Link: https://youtu.be/UxsRpMdmlGo
Comments
I opted not to mention the formats like that or IMD because they do definitely have issues and there are better options. I couldn't get HFEs to hold any GCR data for example. The only reason I have to use HFEs right now is in a Gotek because that's the best way to get it to work with weird disk formats. If the Greaseweazle dev is ever able to port their diskdef code over to flashfloppy, since they right both, I think we could get away with plain IMGs for almost everything.
Tech Tangents
2024-02-23 13:12:05 +0000 UTCMy goal is to preserve my floppies in three formats. Flux, raw binary and decoded binary. Flux and decoded binary are as you described them. I like the idea of using raw binary images when emulating discs as it preserves more of the non-data content. HFE seems to be the main file format for this although I'm not really a fan. Mainly because it records track length in number of bytes and tracks aren't guaranteed to decoded to an even number of bytes. This leads to the possibility of a discountenuoty at the end of a track. Normally it's in the sector gap and that's fine but I have some disks (windows 2.11) that don't start their tracks at the same point and it breaks those
Kyle Brown
2024-02-23 04:46:14 +0000 UTC
