CF7 without CF card (or broke?)

[jrhodes]

While i do have a NanoPEB, i am only keeping it as a "just in case" tool, in the event i somehow lose my R.Pi / Tipi.

Not likely, but if it DOES happen, i'll at least be able to still boot into XB and have DSK access.

If my NanoPEB were to stop working AND my Tipi setup was unavailable, i guess i'd just have to wait on a new Tipi / R.Pi to get back up and running.

[Tursi]

Apologies - anyone trying to access my CF7 doc. I forgot to check permissions on it - it should be free to read now to anyone.

 

[Tursi]

1 hour ago, mizapf said:

Yet it seems as if the CF7 does not care; the total sector count is obviously sufficient for it. The only thing that is unclear to me is how an original partition looks like, which has been created without importing a disk image but directly by CALL FORMAT. I'd take that as a template for the partition creation in TIImageTool.

Yeah, it doesn't care at all. Every disk image always occupies 800k of the CF card (and occupies thus 400k of TI space, even if it's not all used.)

CALL FORMAT does nothing but write those two sectors - you can pull them out of the image I uploaded (just, remember every other byte is a 0 on purpose and should be discarded). I didn't check what the values actually are, but I think it creates 400k disk images, the maximum possible (but certainly not real).

[+mizapf]

The CF7 seems to format a new volume like this (taken from your test_cf7.bin):

 

00000000: 5600 4f00 4c00 3100 2000 2000 2000 2000  V.O.L.1. . . . .
00000010: 2000 2000 0600 4000 2000 4400 5300 4b00   . ...@. .D.S.K.
00000020: 2000 2800 0100 0100 0000 0000 0000 0000   .(.............

 

so it is 1600 sectors (>0640), 32 sectors/track (>20), 40 tracks (>28), 1 head (>01) and single density (>01). That does not compute, as "Mother" would say, but it does not matter either, since this is not a real floppy disk.

[Count9929A]

On 11/22/2023 at 1:08 AM, mizapf said:

It seems to me that the CF7/NanoPEB loses more and more against the TIPI. Maybe there are not so many people actively using it as I expected. Still, I'd like to keep the support in TIImageTool, but I have not yet added the support in MAME, and I'm not sure whether this would really be worth the effort, now that we have a working TIPI support. Maybe from the archival point of view.

First of all Mizapf thank you very much for your great work! My "TI99 life" is mainly based on your efforts, since not having a Windows PC my preferred emulator is MAME, and since I heavily rely on TIImageTool to handle disks image. I don't know how I'll ever be able to repay you, maybe I should give you rematch in the TI invaders competition 🙂

Besides yours, the other essential tool to carry on my TI99 activities is my NanoPEB, which I use actively and with much satisfaction, also thanks to the ease with which TIIMT allows me to manage the CF...

so please continue to support it!! 🙂

Then again I agree with you that direct support in MAME, although nice is not essential, my workflow that uses TIIMP to exchange files between NanoPEB and MAME is efficient enough for my needs.
 

Edited November 23, 2023 by Count9929A
small clarification