"OmniFlop" does the trick! (-:

[GratedTopping]

I'm a happy "nerd".

 

I've been trying to find the easiest ways to move TI files to the PC. Recently, I was using a terminal emulator on the TI and on an old PC laptop and transferring through the serial cable.

 

It was recommended here that I could use Barry Boone's archive-program to compress a disk to a file and then I'd just have to transfer one file...but I couldn't get that to work. I couldn't get the laptop to send the archiver to the TI.

 

I have a 3.5 floppy on the TI. On my PC, I was hoping that "TI99-PC" would read such disks, but a problem apparently with that is that the floppy disk

controller on many old PC's can't read single density.

 

All was not lost: "OmniFlop" CAN make the PC read single density. It had a driver that replaces the floppy disk filing system, allowing you to access so many types of disks from old machines! It still allows normal formatting of regular disks on Windows. Details say that you don't need to install/replace the floppy

disk controller [FDC] unless you're using a TI with quad format (something like that; I forget, but it's not something that I think anybody has).

 

Replace the floppy driver with the one with the product and you've got access to read and write so many classic formats.

 

Using TI disks was added to the most recent edition and it works great! I can now read and write to all TI 3.5 disks. Apparently, it would work on an ancient machine that would have the 5 1/4 disk drive, too, but it is not recommended.

 

On the TI, I backup a 5 1/4 disk to the 3.5 using "Disk Manager II". Then, use "OmniFlop". It saves all files on a disk as a V9T9 [Win994a] disk file for use with the emulator and it's really exciting!

 

It's just as easy to take a "Win994a" .TIdisk file and have its contents written to the 3.5 disk for use on my TI.

 

I don't recall ever hearing of this product here; it's awesome! I can't be the only one who discovered it. (-:

 

I'm definitely going to donate to the author.

 

http://www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm#top

Edited September 23, 2010 by GratedTopping

[+retroclouds]

Thanks for pointing this out.

 

Did you use OmniFlop "manually", I mean by issuing the required commands or did you use the menu program that Paolo Bagnaresi wrote ?

 

We have Paolo's menu program added to the development resources sticky thread (check the file transfer section).

But I'm not certain if it's the most recent version.

 

Either way it doesn't harm to add a direct link to omniflop.

 

If you did issue the omniflop commands manually, would you mind sharing the details (parameters, etc.) ?

[GratedTopping]

http://www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop.zip

 

On my WindowsXP machine, I just used the "wizard" executable that came with the download of v2.2d; there's a beta release available to download as well.

 

I never tried any command line statements; I guess there's a different version for those who want to use it that way.

 

Thanks for pointing this out.

 

Did you use OmniFlop "manually", I mean by issuing the required commands or did you use the menu program that Paolo Bagnaresi wrote ?

 

We have Paolo's menu program added to the development resources sticky thread (check the file transfer section).

But I'm not certain if it's the most recent version.

 

Either way it doesn't harm to add a direct link to omniflop.

 

If you did issue the omniflop commands manually, would you mind sharing the details (parameters, etc.) ?

[Brufnus]

Okay, this thread is a tad old, I know. Anyway, I just started using the program too, since I got tired of transferring via a serial connection. It seemed to work fine when I wrote the first DS/DD disk; however, the resulting disk contained corrupted files, so I experimented with different formats - and suddenly, the program failed at 50% every time (apparently when selecting the opposite head).

Thus, I decided to go as high as possible with only single sided (i.e. SS/HD 720KB) - that solved the problem.

 

Now, what makes me wonder... why won't it suddenly format/write both sides of the disks? I think I'll try again later with a different PC/floppy drive and see if that makes a difference. B-)

 

In any case, this is an excellent program and it's such a breeze transferring files to a TI/Geneve like that instead of that tedious terminal solution.  

[+mizapf]

I don't know how OmniFlop handles the track order. Anyway, the TI track order is

 

head 0/track 0 →...→ head 0/track 39 → head 1/track 39 →...→ head 1/track 0

 

So it first covers the side of head 0, then it switches the head to 1 and goes in the opposite direction. On the PC, the order is different: head 0/track 0 → head 1/track 0 → head 0/track 1 → head 1/track 1 →...→ head 0/track 39 → head 1/track 39.

 

Keep in mind that HD is only supported by the HFDC floppy controller on the TI, and only reliablly after a hardware mod. HD is not a recommended density for the TI ecosystem.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

29 minutes ago, mizapf said:

I don't know how OmniFlop handles the track order. Anyway, the TI track order is

 

head 0/track 0 →...→ head 0/track 39 → head 1/track 39 →...→ head 1/track 0

 

So it first covers the side of head 0, then it switches the head to 1 and goes in the opposite direction. On the PC, the order is different: head 0/track 0 → head 1/track 0 → head 0/track 1 → head 1/track 1 →...→ head 0/track 39 → head 1/track 39.

 

Keep in mind that HD is only supported by the HFDC floppy controller on the TI, and only reliablly after a hardware mod. HD is not a recommended density for the TI ecosystem.

Don’t forget that even with the hardware mod (9216B and 32k SRAM) the hfdc dsr does not support anything more than 2 sectors per allocation unit.

 

In other words, the high density “file structure” is not implemented in the hfdc dsr.  Only with a Geneve can you use high density disks as a file storage medium, unless you choose to format the HD disk with a capacity of 800k or less.  (Which isn’t very likely) 

[Gary from OPA]

20 minutes ago, InsaneMultitasker said:

Don’t forget that even with the hardware mod (9216B and 32k SRAM) the hfdc dsr does not support anything more than 2 sectors per allocation unit.

 

In other words, the high density “file structure” is not implemented in the hfdc dsr.  Only with a Geneve can you use high density disks as a file storage medium, unless you choose to format the HD disk with a capacity of 800k or less.  (Which isn’t very likely) 

How do I know if I got the 9216b and 32k hardware mod on my hfdc? I know it was upgraded at some point and us working fine in my 4a but would like to get 1.44mb working with of course finishing the dsr support as well.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

25 minutes ago, Gary from OPA said:

How do I know if I got the 9216b and 32k hardware mod on my hfdc? I know it was upgraded at some point and us working fine in my 4a but would like to get 1.44mb working with of course finishing the dsr support as well.

Inspect the card.  The separator will be a 9216 or a 9216B.  Some of the later cards produced by Myarc were built with the 9216B.  Nearly all cards were built with the 8K chip, which I think is sufficient for floppy high density, whereas the 32k update was needed to run CFORM, a Geneve program that can format a hard drive at 33 or 34 sectors per cylinder, in addition to the standard 32. 
 

Source code to the stable H11 DSR is not available.  The source that is available is different in many segments and was reportedly not stable.
 

I assessed the two hfdc DSRs long ago and at that time, it seemed like way too much work for relatively little gain. I say this not to discourage you, just be aware it isn’t only a matter of updating the cluster and AU calculations.  (The cluster nybble groupings cannot exceed 4095 sectors/offset without assigning 2 or more sectors per cluster, which brings in some additional calc challenges to the core routines) 

[Brufnus]

On 9/8/2024 at 7:17 PM, mizapf said:

I don't know how OmniFlop handles the track order. Anyway, the TI track order is

 

head 0/track 0 →...→ head 0/track 39 → head 1/track 39 →...→ head 1/track 0

 

So it first covers the side of head 0, then it switches the head to 1 and goes in the opposite direction. On the PC, the order is different: head 0/track 0 → head 1/track 0 → head 0/track 1 → head 1/track 1 →...→ head 0/track 39 → head 1/track 39.

 

Keep in mind that HD is only supported by the HFDC floppy controller on the TI, and only reliablly after a hardware mod. HD is not a recommended density for the TI ecosystem.

Yes, I have the hardware mod on both HFDC's. c",) however, the direction could of course be the issue, but then again - it seems that others use OmniFlop with TI format without having similar problems? c".)

[Brufnus]

On 9/8/2024 at 8:04 PM, Gary from OPA said:

How do I know if I got the 9216b and 32k hardware mod on my hfdc? I know it was upgraded at some point and us working fine in my 4a but would like to get 1.44mb working with of course finishing the dsr support as well.

Yes well I don't think either that there are other ways to tell, except for examining the card physically. I have both the B chip and the 32K upgrade on both my HFDC's, and it's been working fine with 1.44MB formatted disks in my case, and with CFORM (although I usually format with MDM5 now). c",)

Edited September 11 by Brufnus

[Brufnus]

On 9/8/2024 at 7:42 PM, InsaneMultitasker said:

Don’t forget that even with the hardware mod (9216B and 32k SRAM) the hfdc dsr does not support anything more than 2 sectors per allocation unit.

 

In other words, the high density “file structure” is not implemented in the hfdc dsr.  Only with a Geneve can you use high density disks as a file storage medium, unless you choose to format the HD disk with a capacity of 800k or less.  (Which isn’t very likely) 

I did succeed with this program formatting only as single sided, but in high density - so I got 720K available, copied the MDOS 7.45 image to the diskette, and it worked flawlessly on the Geneve; e.g. no CRC errors in the SYSTEM/SYS according to CYA, and the programs I tried, launched perfectly fine as well (ABASIC, GPL, CYA), as well as booting with the SYSTEM/SYS.

 

When it comes to general use by others, it might be better to use DS/DD (5 1/4"?) diskettes of course; however, I haven't had any success with my current setup (my configuration or the drive itself causes problems; I'll need to investigate this when I have the time. At least I have a couple of drives I can test with).

Edited September 11 by Brufnus