Justin England wrote:
"mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote in message 1160963948.968456.17030@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com">news:1160963948.968456.17030@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...Michael J. Mahon wrote:But, again, any disk image buffering scheme rules out some of the most interesting (copy protected) disks. If the only thing it could handle was unprotected disks, then we already have many ways of deailing with them. It seems like a lot of work just to achieve "yet another" way of getting unprotected disks to a PC.Agreed. I can see the appeal though - especially for those who don't have hard disks or other storage on their Apple II's. It offers the promise of a quick and seamless approach, especially if the device had Ciderpress integration. The path of least resistance for transferring copy protected images is probably to design a file format capable of it, then hack/modify Copy II plus to allow image creation.Since the A2 is perfectly capable of creating images of copy protected disk (if the protection scheme is known), than it should be the tool used for creating images. I want something to create real disks. Right before I moved I remember using CiderPress to look at some of the disks that I had copied to my server, and found that it was an excellent tool for managing images on my PC. CiderPress also makes it easy to manage images (or any apple archive for that matter) that I have downloaded from the internet. My desire is to have a way to create real disks from my PC.
Just so I understand, you mean that you want primarily to use the drive attached to a PC to write images to real disks? Since only unprotected (.dsk) or very weakly protected (.nib) images exist, it shouldn't be too difficult to write unprotected disks a track at a time. That will take an 8KB buffer in the outboard controller, assuming that nibblization is done on the PC side. Reading unprotected disks to transfer them to images should be straightforward, too. What would be truly difficult would be supporting an emulator directly accessing the drive. -michael NadaNet networking for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."