+dhe Posted January 18, 2023 Share Posted January 18, 2023 Does anyone have any experience with the device side FC5025? http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted January 18, 2023 Share Posted January 18, 2023 20 minutes ago, dhe said: Does anyone have any experience with the device side FC5025? http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html What do you want know? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Thornquist Posted January 18, 2023 Share Posted January 18, 2023 Yup. Bought one eons ago. Tried every which way to get it working - no dice. Hmm... you got me curious. I may have to dig it out and give it one more try. - Rick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+dhe Posted January 18, 2023 Author Share Posted January 18, 2023 1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said: What do you want know? Well, I can't seem to get it to work. I say read a TI 360K disk - it seems to work, but it tells me there were read errors and it quotes me on tracks up to 79 - even though a TI 360K disk only uses 40 tracks. Further, it does create a 360K file, but ti99dir can't read it as a TI disk. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+9640News Posted January 19, 2023 Share Posted January 19, 2023 I have one with the specified floppy drive type they recommended for use. It works last time I tried about 7 years ago. Sitting on my desk hooked up to an unused PC. Beery Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted January 19, 2023 Share Posted January 19, 2023 1 hour ago, dhe said: Well, I can't seem to get it to work. I say read a TI 360K disk - it seems to work, but it tells me there were read errors and it quotes me on tracks up to 79 - even though a TI 360K disk only uses 40 tracks. Further, it does create a 360K file, but ti99dir can't read it as a TI disk. Been a few years. I made a few disk images from it. Kind-of abandoned it for the Kryoflux, but I have here in case it is useful, again. Track 79... are you using an HD drive? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+dhe Posted January 19, 2023 Author Share Posted January 19, 2023 Nope, a teac 55br. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickyDean Posted January 19, 2023 Share Posted January 19, 2023 I have one too, but could nor get a good floppy drive recommended for it at an affordable, for me at the time, price. Now too much else going on for the moment. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted January 19, 2023 Share Posted January 19, 2023 14 minutes ago, dhe said: Nope, a teac 55br. Have you tested the drive otherwise? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+dhe Posted January 19, 2023 Author Share Posted January 19, 2023 The drive came out of a working pbox about six months ago, where it was replaced with a gotek. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+9640News Posted January 19, 2023 Share Posted January 19, 2023 I think you need the recommended drive. I haven't looked at the software in the past 7 years to see if they ever did any additional updates. Last time I used the software, it was NOT autodetect on the size of diskette inserted. You had to specify SD, DD, SS, or DS. Beery Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Ksarul Posted January 19, 2023 Share Posted January 19, 2023 I see one immediate compatibility flag when reading the instructions on the Device Side page: it wants a 1.2M drive, even when reading a 360K disk. This tells me that your TEAC FD55BR will not work here. I suspect part of the reason is that their software is double-stepping the heads when trying to read in 360K mode, which totally messes things up on a 40-track drive. I also suspect that there will be a lot less problems using a FD55GFR or pretty much any other 1.2M drive when trying to read stuff. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+dhe Posted January 19, 2023 Author Share Posted January 19, 2023 Ok.. I ordered the specified drive. Now to wait wait and try again. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
humeur Posted January 20, 2023 Share Posted January 20, 2023 I've had one for a long time and it works well. JL Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+jedimatt42 Posted January 20, 2023 Share Posted January 20, 2023 Each side of a 360k 40 track disk has 40 tracks. With 2 sides, that comes to 80 tracks. So if single sided is not specified, I would expect any of these devices to try for the total 80 tracks (both sides) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Ksarul Posted January 20, 2023 Share Posted January 20, 2023 5 minutes ago, jedimatt42 said: Each side of a 360k 40 track disk has 40 tracks. With 2 sides, that comes to 80 tracks. So if single sided is not specified, I would expect any of these devices to try for the total 80 tracks (both sides) Correct, to a point. The problem is the track stepping. Since it is expecting to find up to 80 tracks on each side of the disk (HD), it will double-step between tracks to access a 40-track (DD) disk. That will have it reading every other track on the disk, losing half of the disk content in a way that makes the disk unrecoverable if the physical drive is only capable of 40 tracks per side. I suspect that it "might" also work fine with an 80-track TEAC FD-55F, as the track stepping would then be correct. The only other remaining issue would be whatever correction algorithm it is using for the disk rotation speed--the TEAC FD-55BV and the TEAC FD-55F both rotate at 300 RPM, whereas the TEAC FD-55G series rotates at 360 RPM. That could end up seriously garbling the output if it doesn't make the rotation speed downshift in the control software. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+arcadeshopper Posted January 20, 2023 Share Posted January 20, 2023 you definitely have to use the recommended drive.. unlike other devices once I did that it worked to read disks.. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Ksarul Posted January 20, 2023 Share Posted January 20, 2023 3 minutes ago, arcadeshopper said: you definitely have to use the recommended drive.. unlike other devices once I did that it worked to read disks.. The software and hardware are tuned to the expected quirks of the input drive so that the output is intelligible. . . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+dhe Posted January 20, 2023 Author Share Posted January 20, 2023 10 hours ago, humeur said: I've had one for a long time and it works well. JL What's the first 40 bytes of the file it outputs? Can this be read by ti99dir? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
humeur Posted January 21, 2023 Share Posted January 21, 2023 18 hours ago, dhe said: What's the first 40 bytes of the file it outputs? Can this be read by ti99dir? I don't remember any modification of the floppy disk dump. Usable like a real floppy disk Where did you read that there were these 40 bytes JL Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+dhe Posted January 22, 2023 Author Share Posted January 22, 2023 I was using 40 as a round number. Since you have good dumps, I was hoping you could post the first 40 bytes of one of your dumps. As stated on deviceside website: "For TI-99/4A disk images: V9T9 TI-99/4A emulator (shareware, for MS-DOS) Win994a TI-99/4A simulator (freeware, for Windows) Give your disk image filenames an extension of .TIDisk to use them in Win994a." Here are the first few bytes of a disk ti99dir understands: PS D:\classic99_vm\tp99\mydisks\dsk1> format-hex .\TP99V3A.dsk | more Path: D:\classic99_vm\tp99\mydisks\dsk1\TP99V3A.dsk 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F 00000000 54 50 39 39 56 33 20 20 20 20 05 A0 12 44 53 4B TP99V3 . .DSK 00000010 20 28 02 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 (.............. Usually a TI DSK dump mirrors the definition of the Volume Information Block (VIB) 0-9 Disk Name: TP99V3 10-11 Total Number of formatted sector: 05A0 = DS/DD 12 # of Sectors per Track: 12 = 18 sectors per track (and so on...) 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+9640News Posted January 22, 2023 Share Posted January 22, 2023 Just keep in mind, the software for the FC5025 when I last used it, was not smart enough on its own to know whether the disk was single density, double density, single sided, or double sided. If you know your disks are SS/SD, then that is makes copying simpler. However, if you are not sure, read a disk as double sided and double density. If you get errors, I think it had error codes that would alert you to whether it was on side 1 or 2, or whether it had an error on reading 9 or 18 sectors on a track. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted January 22, 2023 Share Posted January 22, 2023 34 minutes ago, 9640News said: Just keep in mind, the software for the FC5025 when I last used it, was not smart enough on its own to know whether the disk was single density, double density, single sided, or double sided. That was one of my frustrations. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
humeur Posted January 22, 2023 Share Posted January 22, 2023 (edited) 8 hours ago, dhe said: I was using 40 as a round number. Since you have good dumps, I was hoping you could post the first 40 bytes of one of your dumps. As stated on deviceside website: "For TI-99/4A disk images: V9T9 TI-99/4A emulator (shareware, for MS-DOS) Win994a TI-99/4A simulator (freeware, for Windows) Give your disk image filenames an extension of .TIDisk to use them in Win994a." Here are the first few bytes of a disk ti99dir understands: PS D:\classic99_vm\tp99\mydisks\dsk1> format-hex .\TP99V3A.dsk | more Path: D:\classic99_vm\tp99\mydisks\dsk1\TP99V3A.dsk 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F 00000000 54 50 39 39 56 33 20 20 20 20 05 A0 12 44 53 4B TP99V3 . .DSK 00000010 20 28 02 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 (.............. Usually a TI DSK dump mirrors the definition of the Volume Information Block (VIB) 0-9 Disk Name: TP99V3 10-11 Total Number of formatted sector: 05A0 = DS/DD 12 # of Sectors per Track: 12 = 18 sectors per track (and so on...) here is an example What is important is finding the right floppy disk drive. Edited January 22, 2023 by humeur 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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