| 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. |