Re: How to make .nib disk images?

["Greg E. Nelson" <gnelson@inetnebr.com>]

Emulators that are supposed to work with the NIB image are Oasis,
AppleWin, ... ??

Writing a program for this is one of those things that I have been
trying to find the time, skill and motivation to do myself.  

The way you create a disk image now is, a program reads the disk bytes
from half a disk and stores that data on a whole normal disk.  Then it
is repeated for the second half.  These two disks get moved to the other
pc and merged into a nib image using the emulated version of the
program.

The NIB image itself is basically a byte for byte copy of the diskette,
all the synch, header, and sector data as written on the disk. 
Somewhere I read about the formatting of the file, but there is
basically a standard buffer length for each track and the tracks are
placed one after the other.  The emulators run the byte stream through
their disk routines to decode the sectors and whatnot to get the data
back out.

So you need to write a routine to read each track and store it to a
file.  This should be fairly easy to do using an Apple II with a ProDOS
mass storage device to hold the file of approximately 240k.  If you can
find the EDD source code that was originally used to make the above
program, you may be able to use it and ProDOS to create a NIB image file
strait from an Apple II.

My approach will be to try and convert a file made on a PC with the
CopyIIPC option board.  It creates essentially the same information
already, it just needs to have the 2nd side data stripped and the data
moved into the standard buffer size of the current NIB format.  In this
way, I should be able to make NIB images directly on my Windows
computer.

Please let us know how you progress.
Thankx,
Ed

Ron Kneusel wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know the format used for .nib disk images and which
> emulators will read these images for non-standard DOS.  Ie, AppleWin,
> at least the one with source code available, seems to look specifically
> for the header bytes used by normal DOS/ProDOS.
> 
> I want to be able to make a .nib image from a non-standard DOS floppy
> and know which emulator is likely to run it.  Note, I do not want to
> know which _programs_ make .nib image but how to write a program to make
> my own.
> 
> Any help appreciated.  Apologies for anything above that is unclear.
> 
> Ron Kneusel
> oneelkruns@hotmail.com