Master 512 "Essential" Disks

[marcusjambler]

Hi All

I've just come across a box of disks that probably arrived with a Master 512 I got a few years ago.
Just checking that they have been archived?

Marcus

[Pernod]

Just checking that they have been archived?

I don't believe they have, so would welcome images of them all.

[marcusjambler]

Well the thing is I dont really trust my 5 1/4 drives.
So I would be happy to post them to someone with more robust hardware

Marcus

[danielj]

I'll happily do them, Marcus.

[marcusjambler]

Thanks Daniel PM sent

[danielj]

These have been received - the DABS support disk is a fungus-fest, so I'll look to cleaning that one physically when I have some time, but the other look in physically pretty good nick. I'm hoovering them up as we speak - some of the stuff was on cowsarenotpurple previously.

Edit - site wasn't working but seems to be fine now!

[marcusjambler]

Great stuff... Thanks for the help Daniel.
Hope they are readable

[danielj]

Yes - all readable. Some bad tracks towards the centre on a few but nothing on those so should be fine. Just have to convert them to sector images now

[danielj]

Here we go - 800kb IMG files are in the acorn DOS format, 200kb SSDs are DFS and the 360kb IMG is PC format and was the DABs companion disk that needed a wash to get the mold off it.

d.

[Pernod]

Here we go - 800kb IMG files are in the acorn DOS format, ...

Thanks, was wondering just the other day how these were progressing.

[marcusjambler]

Thanks Daniel

[Sazhen86]

Here we go - 800kb IMG files are in the acorn DOS format, 200kb SSDs are DFS and the 360kb IMG is PC format and was the DABs companion disk that needed a wash to get the mold off it.

Thanks for imaging these, looks like some interesting content. I'm having some trouble getting them to work with my gotek though. I have a Master 128 with 80286 Pi Co-Pro booted into DOS+ 2.1 and that seems to work OK. When I select one of the essential image files on my gotek I am unable to get a directory listing. I have some other Master 512 disk images that are HFE format and they work OK.

I'm not very familiar with all the different disk image formats. Do I need to convert the .img files to .hfe files somehow or is there a way I can convince my gotek to read them correctly?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

[danielj]

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Yes, you'll need to convert them to HFE *or* use the configure options for flashfloppy to define the correct geometry:
2 sides, 80 tracks, 5 sectors 1024 bytes in size per track, disk is interleaved (read 1 track at a time rather than up one side and down the other), sector numbers start at 1.

See: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wi ... ation-File

This should roughly work, but you'll have to get the tag worked out according to your naming of the files and double checking with the example file provided:

[whatevertag]
cyls=80
heads=2
secs=5
bps=1024

[Sazhen86]

This should roughly work

That worked fine (with a few tweaks to the tag and filenames), thanks! There's always something new to learn.

Now I need to work out why the suprstar utility isn't working.

[danielj]

No disk error? I confess I hadn't tested any of the images, I just checked that they were all "green" as I made them.

[Sazhen86]

No disk error? I confess I hadn't tested any of the images, I just checked that they were all "green" as I made them.

No disk errors that I've seen. The suprstar utility loads OK, but when I hit ctrl-shift-* I get a blank mode 7 screen with a blinking cursor and no way to issue commands or to get back to DOS.

I haven't found time to check out all the other disks yet, if anything odd happens I'll let you know.

Thanks again.

[Sazhen86]

I seem to have resolved this problem by updating the firmware on my PiTubeDirect to the latest Hognose fixes release
PiTubeDirect_Hognose_Fixes_20230621.

Now I can use suprstar, milfix and pcce successfully. Thanks to all involved.

[hoglet]

I seem to have resolved this problem by updating the firmware on my PiTubeDirect to the latest Hognose fixes release
PiTubeDirect_Hognose_Fixes_20230621.

That's great news, thanks for the update.

This version includes a significant change to the 80x86 Co Pro: it now emulates an 80186 with DMA data transfers rather than an 80286 with NMI data transfer.

Dave

[MillieTD83]

I seem to have resolved this problem by updating the firmware on my PiTubeDirect to the latest Hognose fixes release
PiTubeDirect_Hognose_Fixes_20230621.

That's great news, thanks for the update.

This version includes a significant change to the 80x86 Co Pro: it now emulates an 80186 with DMA data transfers rather than an 80286 with NMI data transfer.

Dave

I'm guessing that's why PCCE didn't work with the 286 emulation? Because it was expecting specifically a 186?

[egel]

Just checking that they have been archived?

I don't believe they have, so would welcome images of them all.

Some have been archived at: http://www.cowsarenotpurple.co.uk/bbcco ... l#specific

[Pernod]

Just checking that they have been archived?

I don't believe they have, so would welcome images of them all.

Some have been archived at: http://www.cowsarenotpurple.co.uk/bbcco ... l#specific

Yeah, files only, not full disk images.

[Soruk]

I seem to have resolved this problem by updating the firmware on my PiTubeDirect to the latest Hognose fixes release
PiTubeDirect_Hognose_Fixes_20230621.

That's great news, thanks for the update.

This version includes a significant change to the 80x86 Co Pro: it now emulates an 80186 with DMA data transfers rather than an 80286 with NMI data transfer.

Dave

I'm guessing that's why PCCE didn't work with the 286 emulation? Because it was expecting specifically a 186?

Apologies for the thread archaeology, but PCCE was doing stuff with the NMI handler and that was interfering with the NMI data transfers that were originally used (and why the CPU emulation was an incomplete 286 - only the real mode side was there, if my understanding is correct). With the switch to DMA, PCCE is no longer confusing things, and the emulation is now IDing as an 80186, which also matches what was present in the real hardware.

[wisemoth]

No disk errors that I've seen. The suprstar utility loads OK, but when I hit ctrl-shift-* I get a blank mode 7 screen with a blinking cursor and no way to issue commands or to get back to DOS.

I had this same symptom just now on my physical Master 512. In this case I ran 'SUPRSTAR' without the A or D parameter - which defaults to D (for DFS) per the SUPRSTAR.DOC instructions. But (for whatever reason) my DFS was unplugged. If I run with 'SUPRSTAR A', then I can enter the ctrl-shift-* fine.