[Coco] FHL Color Flex

[Stephen H. Fischer]

Hi,

We need to find the program that copies real floppies to .dsk, and the 
reverse if that was written.

Failing that, we must write code after doing some disassembly.

> Track 0 does not have a sector 1. All of the other tracks don't have a 
> sector 0.

That's messy!

SHF

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frank Swygert" <farna at att.net>
To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 07, 2013 8:17 AM
Subject: Re: [Coco] FHL Color Flex


> So track 0 is different, believed to be single density.  That can cause 
> problems for creating an emulator DSK image file. So WHY is track 0 SD, 
> and what part of the code reads/uses it? The solution may be to solve that 
> riddle and modify the code so that it no longer needs the SD track. I 
> suspect it's a boot program of some kind. FLEX (like OS-9) was likely 
> developed on an old system that used SD disks as standard, then when DD 
> disks became the norm everything was changed except the boot track. That 
> would allow an old system to start then give an on-screen error as to why 
> it stopped, and a newer system (since the controller of the day could read 
> SD and DD) would boot as well. The boot loader that diverts to drive 0 
> track 16 sector 9 may have code pointing back to the SD track. Of course 
> the SD track may be blank formatted and the check for track 0 as SD may 
> just be a simple form of copy protection. Come to think of it, that's the 
> more likely case since it's hard to format one track SD and the rest DD.
>