Re: Hardware gadget for tape loading

[CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Wed, 22 Sep 1999 20:10:10 +0200, "Mickael Pointier"
<mike@defence-force.org> wrote:

>I believe in that case that it would be possible to have a similar system
>for disk drives ?
>A standard way of encoding disk datas, that would allow us to have
>"writedisk" and
>"readdisk" utilities that works for Atari ST, Oric, Spectrum, Apple, etc...

For disk images you might want to look at the 2IMG format created for
Apple IIgs emulators.  It is a universal disk image format with a
header that contains information about the size of the disk image.  It
is currently being used for images of both 5.25" and 3.5" and hard
drive Apple II disks using Apple DOS 3.3, ProDOS and HFS.  It might
even work with MS-DOS formatting but I haven't tried it.

It might require some tweaking of the format to make it multi-system
capable as it does assume 512 byte blocks but Apple DOS 3.3 actually
uses 256 byte sectors but they are just paired up in the 512 byte
blocks so the format might work as is.  There is a spot that the
program that creates the image can put its own information so it
should be possible to work around any problems using that.

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