Knut Roll-Lund <kr-lund@nogarbage.online.no> wrote:
This is my experience too, the transfer disks seems to contain garbage.
A merged real disk won't boot even. I think it must be a problem in SST
vs emulated nib, reading the track information. If we just knew the SST
transfer disk format we could probably break apart a nib into the two
disks. would it be impossible to figure out the SST format?
The NIB format throws away track length and sync byte information.
SST takes one track and writes the nibbles onto two 16-sector tracks,
retaining some of the sync byte info. There's a bunch of stuff that
might be garbage or might be meta-data with track length and other info.
I'm hoping Ed comes up with the EDD or SST source.
Reconstructing a physical floppy from a NIB image requires reinventing the
sync bytes (somewhere between easy and impossible, depending on the disk)
and figuring out the actual track length (easy to moderately difficult,
depending on how the track falls).
Actually the best solution would be if ADT could transfer the nib
directly...
The best solution is to abandon the NIB format as the bad idea it is.
This approach has other problems, like the need for emulators to adopt a
new format, but it'll work out much better in the long run.
If it turns out that SST has the track length and other goodies embedded
in the track info, it should be straightforward to convert to and from
a new format that is roughly as easy to deal with as NIB but preserves
enough information to make reconstruction easier.