Sounds really neat, Gary! I assume that one needs to use serial adapters from
the serial port of the PC (or using a USB-Serial adapter) to mate up with the
original DB-25m end of the TPDD cable. But finding a working TPDD might be an
issue for me.
Thank you for your good work!
Bob
From: M100 [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gary Hammond
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2016 10:45 PM
To: Model 100 Discussion
Subject: [M100] New command line tool for TPDD and TPDD2
Hi All,
So here’s something different…a tool for talking to a real TPDD from a PC. This
is the opposite of most of the discussion here on the list.
I have just finished off the first version of a TPDD command line tool I have
written.
The problem:
The problem I wanted to solve was find an easy way to transfer to a TPDD disk,
files to and from my PC. It was getting laborious transferring files one at a
time via telcom or basic over the serial port from the PC, then switching over
to the TPDD and writing the files back. Even using TSDOS and loading up the max
amount of programs in the M100’s RAM then transferring them as a group via
TSDOS is still a time consuming process.
The solution:
I can now connect my TPDD or TPDD2 to my PC, which can be Windows, Linux or
Mac. I then use the command line tool (TpddTool.py) to perform disk based
commands using familiar command line syntax. The commands include:
- cp myfile.do 0:myfile.do
- cp 1:myprog.ba myprog.ba
- rm 0:file1.co
- cat 1:myfile.do
- mv 0:wrong.do 0:right.do
- format
- status
- dir 1:
and my favourite:
- cpd filedir 0: (this is used to copy a folder of files to the TPDD
or copy the bank of a TPDD to a folder all in one go!
The commands also take DOS equivalents i.e., copy, ren, del, type and copydir.
I have tested the software using a TPDD and a TPDD2 with real coms ports and
USB com port on Wndows 10, CentOS 6 and 7 and Mac OSX (El Capitan). A
fortuitous side effect of writing a test suite for the API is that I now have a
great tool for testing a physical TPDD!
The tool is written in Python and is available with documentation from
http://trs80stuff.net/tpdd/. The reason for Python was its cross platform
compatibility, source code that can be easily read and re-used, and that it
fitted in with some up-skilling I wanted to do for work with respect to auto
documenting code and the nose test framework.
Future ideas I have in mind are:
- Set up and test in on the Raspberry Pi.
- A GUI for drag and drop functionality.
- Implementation of the sector based commands so that a true disk copy
can be performed. It would be a good way to make disk images.
- Create yet another drive simulator to work in the opposite
direction. It would be good on a Raspberry Pi.
Please post any feedback to myself directly or via the list.
Enjoy!
