The definitive Macrosystem Casablanca hack thread!

[retromax]

This is my little box




Found 2 black teac drives in the attic so changed the drive

[retromax]

If I write one of da video’s floppy images using the greaseweasle I don’t get the index error message and it writes the disk but when I pop it into the Casablanca I get the error message alien disk!, is there a problem with how the disk is written? Backing up my own floppies as mentioned before they work no problem but I seem to be having issues with the raw images

Edit:
So ‘alien disk!’ Must refer to mismatched serial numbers
Tried writing one of the de-serialised disks again and there’s a little check box for a teac drive and that’s what seemed to be my issue!
All seems good now

[davideo]

Originally Posted by retromax

So ‘alien disk!’ Must refer to mismatched serial numbers
Tried writing one of the de-serialised disks again and there’s a little check box for a teac drive and that’s what seemed to be my issue!
All seems good now

I was thinking it would be the serial number because I'd written some of these for another member and they worked perfectly.

[retromax]

Originally Posted by davideo

I was thinking it would be the serial number because I'd written some of these for another member and they worked perfectly.

Yeah the issue I was having was that it didn’t want to write the disk if I used the de-serialised ones and for some reason gave me the index error before even attempting to write it, I’m not sure what checking the teac box on the gui did but I tried it simply because my drive is a teac. I even tried my own disks as raw files and wrote them back and they were fine so it just confused me a little as to what it actually changed with that option.
BTW It was You that did actually do my working install disks for me about 2 years ago

[davideo]

Originally Posted by retromax

BTW It was You that did actually do my working install disks for me about 2 years ago

I'd forgotten that it was for you.

An old brain here

[retromax]

Originally Posted by davideo

I'd forgotten that it was for you.

An old brain here

Mines an old one too!

[Jope]

I just did a dry run of writing a casablanca disk with the gw. (I don't have the time now to hook up my casablanca to see whether it boots, hence blind write and read back)

gw write --drive b MacroSystem\ CasaBlanca\ V3.0.8\ Installdisk_mfm00.0.raw

It managed to write it without any conversion. I was very puzzled about the conversion step previously.

Perhaps you need to adjust the many options in the gui to stop it from doing conversions, or just chuck the gui in the bin and use gw from the command line, because it really is a very easy command line tool, no gui needed.

Writing raw like this with KF and GW is always problematic though, as you will never know if your disk was written correctly. Perhaps that's why the GUI is trying to cook your image first before writing - it's the only way to get guaranteed results. You need to have support for the track format in your tools though, and we don't have it for Casablanca in any tools so far.

In my case I read my freshly written disk back in with a KF and analysed it with the HxC tool. A few tracks had bad sectors when read back, could be a bad disk, could be dirty heads, who knows.

So be prepared to have a stack of floppies and clean heads when you attempt to write casablanca disks, no matter which tool you use. It might be also a good idea to wipe the disk with a neodymium magnet before writing to get the cleanest possible signal.

Hopefully one day we will get casablanca support and then a cooked casablanca image could be written with verify using dtc or gw.

[retromax]

I didn’t end up converting anything just simply wrote one of your disks from the raw tracks and what caused it to fail for me the first time seems to be rectified when checking the teac box, I’m not too good with command line stuff hence why I use the gui.
The disk I wrote of yours was the bluebox disk and everything was good, it didn’t seem to copy much from the disk when installing almost like it just authorised software maybe that was already installed as a demo from the installation disk maybe?

[Jope]

Ok, I missed that part where you got it to write. Good that it works!

Many of the installers are really small, most seem to unpack an lzx to the casablanca's hard disk. Sometimes the archives are rather small.

[retromax]

I was writing from the de-serialised disks and installing them on my Casablanca, I came across an issue with disk 2 of spicerack where it just didn’t want to read the disk but I remember having the same issue with a that disk that someone else had done for me a few years ago. I thought I’d have a play around and what I found is that if I took the raw files from davideo’s disk (which wouldn’t install because of a alien disk message) and replaced track 0.0 in that archive with the same track from the de-serialised archive I managed to write a working disk

[Jope]

Great. :-) As long as there's no fragments of files on track 0, you can do this.

[davideo]

@retromax

I had trouble with my original disc. See post #289

[retromax]

Originally Posted by davideo

@retromax

I had trouble with my original disc. See post #289

Yeah I did notice that and was happy to get a working disk as this was the only software I never installed originally when I got the disks from you, all good now

[davideo]

Originally Posted by retromax

Yeah I did notice that and was happy to get a working disk as this was the only software I never installed originally when I got the disks from you, all good now

Excellent

[JaiYenJohn]

This thread has been a lot of help for me as I resurrected an old 68060 cassie that I got this year. So I just wanted everyone to know that I had great success with using a ZuluSCSI RP2040 in place of these 20 year old scsi drives.

Some little gotchas:

• You need an SDHC/XC card that's designed for video and sustained data transfers. The Sandisk Extreme and Extreme Pro lines work for me. If you use just a normal data card you're going to drop frames no matter how "fast" it is.
• The image name on the SD Card has to be "HD0" as it looks like the cassie only can read from that SCSI ID.
• Not sure what the Max partition size is, but I've had success using images that filled 32GB and 64GB cards.

It can record and playback highest quailty (betaSP), and DV without missing a beat. Things got a new lease on life now that the weakest link of spinning rust platters are no longer needed. Hope this can help others getting their's going again.

Here's some images from my testing. Originally used the USB port to power it, but finally found a molex to floppy connector to use, and now it's all tucked away neat and tidy in the drive case.