| Author: | Nate (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Fri, Aug 31st, 2012 @ 19:00 ( . ) |
Alex, please disregard some of the other information provided on this thread. The ZoomFloppy can handle protected disks. All you need is the nibread program, included with the binary distribution. If you are using a 1571, it will work out of the box with nibread and nibwrite. Just use the "-s" flag or the CBMXfer GUI if you don't like the command line. If you are using a 1541 or compatible drive, you'll need to add a parallel cable between the drive and the ZoomFloppy. This involves opening the drive and inserting it under a socketed chip. It does not mean you need a parallel (printer) port on the PC side. This is a mod between the drive and the ZF. [link] hyperactive's complaint is not important in 99% of cases. What he's saying is that he wants to write back (not read) an image with special support for an index-hole sensor that you have to solder into your 1541. An IHS is not required to read protected floppies, and is only needed to remaster (write) a small set of them. In the future, nibtools could be updated to support this with the ZoomFloppy (software-only change) and it would work. So unless you run into this case, don't worry about it. The Kryoflux is a great device, but it currently barely supports writing at all. So I find it hard to complain about the ZoomFloppy's write support in comparison. Eventually, the KF will be updated to support writing really detailed bits, and it will always be better for that purpose. |
 | Author: | hyper active (registered user: 296 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sat, Sep 01st, 2012 @ 00:48 ( . ) |
sorry, I probably didn't explain things clearly enough. In no way did I mean my statements to be misleading. I just thought it would help if I wrote about my experiences with the zoom floppy to prevent others from running into the same problems that I did. When remastering some games back to disk with nibwrite, I can align tracks by using the -t switch. Some protections require that some tracks be written out aligned a certain distance apart from each other. btw: I do not have an IHS. I have been able to successfully write tracks out this way this when using the parallel interface, but it's not been so successful when using the zoom floppy. Also, for some strange reason, I can't use my zoom floppy straight away, I have to switch the drive on and wait about half an hour for it to "warm up", if I try to use it before that time, I'll get strange errors and the connection to the drive will be all flaky. |
| Author: | Nate (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Tue, Sep 04th, 2012 @ 13:09 ( . ) |
Ok, thanks for clarifying. I will try the -t flag and see if I can figure out why it would fail for you. As for the drive warming up, that just sounds like a hardware problem on the drive side. No one else has reported that. |
 | Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Tue, Sep 04th, 2012 @ 14:14 ( . ) |
On 09/04/2012 @ 13:09, Nate wrote :
Ok, thanks for clarifying. I will try the -t flag and see if I can figure out why it would fail for you. : : As for the drive warming up, that just sounds like a hardware problem on the drive side. No one else has reported that. -- Nate, There are two ways the "timer" track alignment worked. In the original version, we calculated the motor speed and did approximate calculations of how long it took to "get back around" to the next revolution. We then just waited a bit and sent the next track. I later replaced this with code that runs inside the drive itself. It unformats the tracks (all 00) then writes a short sync to each while moving the heads across the disk. This causes a small skew, but works pretty well. I was never able to get the VIA timers programmed to wait exactly the right amount of time for the next revolution. We then use the "wait for sync" writing option to "align" the tracks. Now, with ZF, the extra commands used to tell the code to wait for a sync, or wait for IHS, don't work. They cause the ZF to timeout. I thought that Arnd had modified the ZoomFloppy firmware code to work at some point after release, but it may be lost, as I can't find the e-mail. -Pete |
| Author: | Nate (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Thu, Sep 06th, 2012 @ 13:41 ( . ) |
Thanks for clarifying, Pete. I'll look into this sometime soon. |
 | Author: | Alex G (registered user: 13 posts ) |
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| Date: | Tue, Sep 04th, 2012 @ 14:07 ( . ) |
Thanks Nate, I don't really plan on writing originals back to disk. Mostly I'm just looking to add them to the preservation project if I can. |