osiweb.org

Hi,

Just a thought/question. What is the best way to preserve OSI disks? Other systems have disk image/archiving formats like D64 (Commodore), DMS (Amiga), ATR (Atari), or ISO etc.

I guess tape archival is another question... perhaps recording them to MP3 or better, some lossless format.

Steve

I'm in the process of dumping my OSI disks track by track to text files using the OSI dump program found with the windows OSI emulator package. I have also written a complementary program to take the track data from the serial port and write it back to the disk.

For tapes, a lossless format such as WAV would probably be better than MP3.

Ed has written a converter for Kansas City Standard WAV files (sampled at 22050 Hz) to binary data. The converter works both ways, which is useful. He provides a DOS binary, but if you are using another system, you will have to port the FORTH source to your local FORTH system. (Link: http://www.netbay.com.au/~dxforth/

I also found a KCS WAV file reader/decoder written in Perl by Martin Ward, which should run virtually any modern system and also tolerates higher sampling rates for improved detection on poor quality tapes (see the discussion on his web page and in the code.


For disks, Mark has extended Ed's disk dumper utility. This utility is downloaded to the OSI using the ROM-monitor loader via the serial port, (and then you could store it on disk, if you want to). When you run the program, it allows you to dump an entire disk to a disk image via the serial port. Mark supports disk images in his OsiEmu emulator, which is the most complete emulator for OSI. Here's the link: http://www.marks-lab.com/osi/ I think that would be a good format for storing disks. It may be necessary to write a reverse disk-dump utility to prepare a floppy from a disk image. I'm not sure if he's using raw tracks, or some kind of embellished format. Any comments, mark?

Good luck,

Dave

Looks like Bill posted while I was still typing. That's great bill! Any chance of making that program, and the disk images available?

Dave

dave wrote:Looks like Bill posted while I was still typing. That's great bill! Any chance of making that program, and the disk images available?

That is my intention. I want to get things cleaned up a bit first.

bsudbrink wrote:I'm in the process of dumping my OSI disks track by track to text files using the OSI dump program found with the windows OSI emulator package. I have also written a complementary program to take the track data from the serial port and write it back to the disk.

Hmm, I never thought to check the emulator... makes sense. I guess I'll have to set my system back up and do some transfering!
I have a boxload of tapes I got with the Superboard I bought a few years back... no idea what's on them. The Superboard is not working and the cassette connections on my C4P need restoring...

Steve