I will chip my 5 cents worth in here... For some reference, i have
experience writing some weird formats to both 3.5 and 5.25 floppy disks.
On 25/09/2024 02:57, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
And more specifically, would it be
possible for anyone to image such a disk with a copy of PC-DOS 2.0 or
earlier? (and maybe on up to 3.3 or so)
There is a plethora of floppy disk manipulation software out there. Much
of it for PC based systems. There is a DOS based CP/M image writing
software suite i have seen but not used. Omniflop, which is freeware for
32bit NT OSes can write a whole host of obscure systems, probably
including your Sharp system. Obviously, you need disk images to write to
the floppies, but any post-pentium system should be a good bridge system
for such a task. Win2k is the last NT system without activation, so is a
great candidate for an NT bridge system.
The later part is the service that would be more helpful to me. I finally
have a drive for an old system that currently uses bubble memory cartridges
to boot to PC-DOS 2.0, and so we'd like to see if (using these external
drives) it could also boot to a (confirmed legit) image of IBM PC-DOS
(and/or very early Microsoft DOS). Or, do we still need some kind of
proprietary Sharp DOS image? (in which case, extra blank disk would be
good, as I think there are tools on these bubble memory cartridges to
initialize disks accordingly).
As long as the floppy drive has a Shugart compatible interface
("standard" 5.25 card edge or 34pin connector) you can use said drive
with a PC to format the disks. Might require drive swapping between
systemsand a kludgy system to make them, but it's pretty simple. I'm
sure there's disk images out there.
Cheers,
Josh Rice
