Simon Cooke wrote: > Ack! Don't do that! > > The SAMDOS boot loader can only load from the first side of > the disk. It literally has no code to handle swapping ports > to access the second side.
Ar, ok! I probably only managed it because the disk hadn't got much on it, and I only checked that BOOT 1 worked. > Of course, I have no idea how you can tell the system to put > that first sector in the right place, but there you go. I figured the sector would always be used by the first file, since it'd be the first free sector found. So removing file 1 would mean the next file written would take it. It does assume that DOS will always allocate sectors in that order, but I think that'd be true of all existing versions. > Here's a question: What's the highest track number that > SimCoupe supports? I've formatted disks from track 0 up to > track 83 before now. The FDC doesn't really impose a limit, so it depends on the disk image format you're using. DSK and (the headerless) SDF are only 80 track, but an appropriate SAD image would be fine. The New Disk function restricts you to 'real world' geometry values by default - 84 tracks, with the number of sectors depending on the sector size, to allow for sector header and gap overheads. You can also check an option to allow larger geometry sizes, which gives you up to 128 tracks (leaving bit 7 for anything wanting it to store disk side, just in case). There is more of an issue with using larger numbers of sectors on a track, as the FDC track length is still ~6250 bytes. You could create a SAD image with 100 * 512 byte sectors, but you could never programmatically format up a flexible image format to the same geometry! Si
