Re: Reading apple disks on PC

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <s9CTa.63565$kI5.11598@nwrddc02.gnilink.net>,
news.verizon.net <mpender@hotmail.com> wrote:
> "Paul Schlyter" <pausch@saaf.se> wrote in message
> news:bfmno3$1a2m$1@merope.saaf.se...
>> In article <BvATa.56060$EZ2.15949@nwrddc01.gnilink.net>,
>> news.verizon.net <mpender@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It is a kind offer, but since the FID code works with DSK images instead
>>> of dealing with physical disks I don't think the code would really help.
>>
>> You have obviously not looked at that code.....
>>
>> It has a (logical) "Read Sector" function, which of course only
>> indexes into the DSK image and copies a 256-byte block from there.
>> But if you replace that with a function which reads a real sector off
>> a real disk, then the file system parts ought to work fine if it's an
>> Apple DOS 3.3 disk.  Yep, I had that possibility in mind when I wrote
>> that code .... no I don't have any concrete plans in that direction,
>> but OTOH you'll never know what use your code may find.
> 
> The "function which reads a real sector" is the part that's hard to write.
> Once we can read the physical media, the process of making a DSK file is a
> piece of cake.
 
OK, if the aim is merely to transfer the data on the physical disk to
a DSK image, then you need not worry about file systems of course.
 
I responded to someone who said that implementing file systems would
be one of the major dofficulties in the project.  And I assumed that
the aim was to deal with the physical disk at file system level, not
at sector level.  But if that's not the case, then code for file
systems will of course be irrelevant.
 
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