On 4/17/20 1:35 PM, Mugglepiece Theater wrote:
Anyone know how to actually get the content off a 3.5 diskette after
saving from the Tandy PDD. I've got the whole setup working, just can't
get my docs onto any other device. And external disk drives aren't
working on any of my laptops.
On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 9:10 PM Tom Wilson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/TANDY-TRS-80-Portable-Disk-Drive-26-3808-Floppy-Disk-Drive/324136920341?hash=item4b7810e515:g:0kAAAOSwNAJel2Yv
Not my auction.
I'd buy it myself, but "untested" always worries me.
Tom Wilson
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
(619)940-6311
K6ABZ
The disk format is physically incompatible with any normal floppy drive.
The only way to read the data is with an actual TPDD or TPDD2 drive.
It's not just a matter of non-standard sector layouts or logical
formatting or filesystem. The magnetic encoding is different and modern
normal floppy controller chips don't have the support for it.
There are a few different programs that have been made over the years to
access a real tpdd drive using a serial port on a modern computer, but
most of those are now also old, needing DOS and not being open source so
it's just a .exe with not much support or documentation by now.
But we do have a python util now thanks to Gary Hammond that is slightly
rough around the edges, but is new and open source and runs on anything
and any os.
https://trs80stuff.net/tpdd/
This allows you to connect a real tpdd to a current machine and os via
serial port (usb-serial adapter), and both read and write files.
--
bkw
--
bkw
