BAWarp disk imager

[BlueAchenar]

Originally Posted by prowler

Well, good luck with that. It sounds like an ideal project for someone with your programming skills and inquiring mind. I'm not averse to a bit of soldering myself, so I'll be following the Cyclone20 project to see where it leads.

For disk imaging I have a Catweasel ISA card, which I am very sure of, and I am a registered user of Vincent Joguin's Disk2FDI program which I am equally pleased with. However, I also have a Catweasel MkIV which is still in the box, until they release some drivers to give it the promised functionality...

The Cyclone20 project seems like a good way forward. It'll be interesting to see what develops.

In the meantime, if there's anything you think I can do to help with your project, just let me know. I'll be only too pleased to assist.

Disk2FDI looks interesting.

The Catweasel is too expensive for something I can't tweak.

Don't worry. There's still the compactflash driver if you feel like testing something, I've not trashed it. It's just been a little on hold.

If you're going to follow the Cyclone20 project with your own dev board, you'll be able to use my codebase also, like I had said.

[Supamax]

So the BAWARP project is dead?
Noooooooooo.....

In an old post DrF said: "Theres some trackdisk replacement thingy on Aminet somewhere that allows 930ish K I think on a disk". Perhaps studying that you could see how to slow down the drive... just an idea. I don't know if the greater capacity is achieved by slowing the drive down

Jope wrote: "There are schematics and info regarding the 150rpm modification on Aminet. The modified drives are told to be very unstable at 150rpm, barely able to read the disks.."

This is probably silly, but: if the drive motor is not a stepper motor (I mean the motor which makes the floppy surface spin, not the stepper motor which moves the heads), couldn't we use some sort of addictional circuit (hardware pwm) to slow it down 50% (150 rpm)? Such a project could be also useful to slow down PC HD drives (with a switch, connected to the HD sensor) so that they can be used in HD-mode on Amigas...

[BlueAchenar]

Originally Posted by Supamax

So the BAWARP project is dead?
Noooooooooo.....

In an old post DrF said: "Theres some trackdisk replacement thingy on Aminet somewhere that allows 930ish K I think on a disk". Perhaps studying that you could see how to slow down the drive... just an idea. I don't know if the greater capacity is achieved by slowing the drive down

I haven't seen the code, but my guess is 930KB on a disk is achieved by reducing the inter sector gap sizes, not by slowing the drive.

Jope wrote: "There are schematics and info regarding the 150rpm modification on Aminet. The modified drives are told to be very unstable at 150rpm, barely able to read the disks.."

If we use modified drives, not everyone will be able to use the imager in a standard Amiga, which was the point.

This is probably silly, but: if the drive motor is not a stepper motor (I mean the motor which makes the floppy surface spin, not the stepper motor which moves the heads), couldn't we use some sort of addictional circuit (hardware pwm) to slow it down 50% (150 rpm)? Such a project could be also useful to slow down PC HD drives (with a switch, connected to the HD sensor) so that they can be used in HD-mode on Amigas...

Hummm, I thought that was pretty much what I tried. There used to be multi-speed floppy drives, but these are hard to find.

I still think rawread could be made to work in a standard Amiga 500/600 using DMA and a little trick in the Index detection interrupt. But I won't mess with Toni's code without his permission.

Off-Topic but funny: My boss got notified he would be inspected by ASSOFT (portuguese anti software piracy organization). What did he do when he got home? Put all his Amiga floppies in a large bag and burn them, because he thought he would get fined because of them. What a waste. He might as well have given them to me.

Well. My ARM board and some of the connectors needed have arrived. I'm close to starting the USB floppy controller.

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by BlueAchenar

My boss got notified he would be inspected by ASSOFT

I can't help but chuckle I wonder who invented the name for that company

Originally Posted by BlueAchenar

What did he do when he got home? Put all his Amiga floppies in a large bag and burn them, because he thought he would get fined because of them. What a waste. He might as well have given them to me.

When did that happen? Recently? If so, your boss is a m*r*n. Who cares about pirated Amiga Stuff nowadays?

[BlueAchenar]

Originally Posted by StingRay

I can't help but chuckle I wonder who invented the name for that company



When did that happen? Recently? If so, your boss is a m*r*n. Who cares about pirated Amiga Stuff nowadays?

About a week ago.

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by BlueAchenar

About a week ago.

Too bad about the disks then :/ Even if they would have found them I doubt they would have even been able to check the content.

[BlueAchenar]

Originally Posted by StingRay

Too bad about the disks then :/ Even if they would have found them I doubt they would have even been able to check the content.

Most likely. There are still many people with Amigas in my town though. Someday I'll try to check for some rare games.

[BlueAchenar]

Ok. I've decided to make a imager which dumps extended ADFs for fun. I still want to test the error correction routines.

[BlueAchenar]

Could someone test drive this? It should write a (large) raw image (not adf) of the disk. A500/A600 will also be fine. I need this data to complete the program.

[BlueAchenar]

Anyone? Looks like I'll have to wait for prowler.

[TCD]

@BA
Have you ever considered drinking less coffee mate? One and a half hour and you're gettin' impatient, ts ts ts

[BlueAchenar]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

@BA
Have you ever considered drinking less coffee mate? One and a half hour and you're gettin' impatient, ts ts ts

I like to do things fast. That's probably why I have plenty of spare time at work.

[BlueAchenar]

Could someone tell me how do I detect the CPU model the program is running on?

[BlueAchenar]

Ok. This one will DMA read 5 copies of each track and dump them to a file. You need 150000 bytes chip ram available. I need this information to implement the error correction and conversion to extended ADF.

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by BlueAchenar

Could someone tell me how do I detect the CPU model the program is running on?

You need to check Excec's ATTNFLAGS.

    move.l    $4.w,a6            ; get execbase
    moveq    #0,d2
    move.b    $129(a6),d2

now you can check for the different CPU types in d2, bit 0-3, 60010-68040, bit 7 68060.


Eg. if bit1 is set the CPU is at least an 68020.

[BlueAchenar]

Originally Posted by StingRay

You need to check Excec's ATTNFLAGS.

    move.l    $4.w,a6            ; get execbase
    moveq    #0,d2
    move.b    $129(a6),d2

now you can check for the different CPU types in d2, bit 0-3, 60000-68040, bit 7 68060.


Eg. if bit1 is set the CPU is at least an 68020.

Thanks mate!

You mean something like this right?

static ULONG GetCPU()
{
    UBYTE *sys = *(UBYTE **)4;
    UBYTE cpubits = sys[0x129];
    if(cpubits & 0x80)
    {
        return 68060;
    }
    if(cpubits & 0x08)
    {
        return 68040;
    }
    if(cpubits & 0x04)
    {
        return 68030;
    }
    if(cpubits & 0x02)
    {
        return 68020;
    }
    if(cpubits & 0x01)
    {
        return 68010;
    }
    return 68000;
}

Edit: I cleaned it up to this:

static ULONG GetCPU()
{
    if(SysBase->AttnFlags & AFF_68060)
    {
        return 68060;
    }
    if(SysBase->AttnFlags & AFF_68040)
    {
        return 68040;
    }
    if(SysBase->AttnFlags & AFF_68030)
    {
        return 68030;
    }
    if(SysBase->AttnFlags & AFF_68020)
    {
        return 68020;
    }
    if(SysBase->AttnFlags & AFF_68010)
    {
        return 68010;
    }
    return 68000;
}

[BlueAchenar]

New version. Improved compatibility with different amiga models and more options. I still need a raw dump though. Run the app with no args for options.

[StingRay]

I'll test it on my a4k in a few minutes You "GetCPU" code looks fine to me.

Edit: Ok, tested it. It doesn't seem to work correctly. You parser doesn't seem to accept any name for the image. I tried it with:

1. alewarp ram:test -> Invalid Argument 'RAM:TEST'
2. alewarp image=ram:test -> Invalid Argument 'IMAGE=RAM:TEST'

So I suppose that's a bug. Also, when the program is started without any arguments you should just print the help text and quit instead of still trying to read a disk then (without any info for the user to see, I first thought your program crashed).
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to read any tracks anyway when I start it without arguments.

[BlueAchenar]

Thanks mate! "alewarp dh0:image" will do just fine. If it works, uploading the image to me will be an all different matter (it's going to be biiiiiiiig)

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by BlueAchenar

"alewarp dh0:image" will do just fine.

Nope, as said, it doesn't seem to accept any "image" parameters.
"alewarp dh0:image" -> Invalid argument 'dh0:image'

You need to fix your parser.