It would be great to see the game you wrote with SCADS always interested in seeing what SAM stuff is out there
Andy -----Original Message----- From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Dicky Moore Sent: 27 July 2011 11:52 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: RE: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive Geoff, Howard, Leszek, Simon, Nev, & Thomas, thanks so much for your help. You are all so kind to reply so quickly and I'm totally humbled by your expertise. I tracked down a friend who still has a desktop PC with a built in IDE floppy drive, and gave it a go with that. Samdisk worked a treat, and I was so surprised to see that all the floppy disks still worked - after up to 20 years in storage. I've still got another big box to go through though. Fingers crossed the SCADS game I made back in the early 90s, "Bogie goes crazy ape bonkers with his four legs and magic eyeballs" has survived the wait! ;) I'm having a clearout (new baby) and am sadly going to part with my Sam and all the disks. I just don't use it anymore and I'm not even sure where the power supply is. I've got a whole load of original Fred disks (around issues 20-60) and the original manual for SCADS if anyone wants them. Thanks again for your help. -- Dicky Moore | Bearcraft 07702 100 180 http://dickymoore.co.uk | http://bearcraftmusic.com -----Original Message----- From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of nev young Sent: 22 July 2011 17:55 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Accessing Sam formatted disks through a USB floppy drive On 22/07/11 15:38, Dicky Moore wrote: > Hey all > > Has anyone had any luck in copying Sam-formatted floppy disks to .dsk > or .mgt images using a USB floppy drive? > Very little hope of doing that. All the programs I've seen, or written myself, need to access the floppy disk controller which you usually can not do through usb. If your PC has a floppy controller I would suggest connecting a floppy drive directly to that, (possibly hanging out of the side and balanced on a pile of books) to do the copy. Then put your machine back together again. If you really want to use the usb floppy drive then if you're feeling very strong hearted you might try running a linux system and using the dd utility. Something like: dd noerror if=/dev/fda of=~/image.txt Tell it to ignore errors, as on a 1.44Mb disk it will expect 18** sectors per track. So the last 8 will error. I've never tried this so can not vouch for if it would work. Even if it does you'll have to play about with the image to make it usable. ** I think a 1.44Mb disk has 2 sides of 80 tracks with 18 sectors of 512 bytes but I may be wrong. Nev
