We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: floppy

  • Reading Atari ST floppy images on linux

    Atari ST disks were weird. Although they were nominally FAT format 3½″ double density disks, they wouldn’t read on a PC. You could format a disk on a PC, however, and the Atari would read/write it just fine.

    I had a (virtual) stack of roughly 170 Atari ST disk images that I wanted to access from Linux. mtools, the FAT image reading suite for Linux, could only read 4 of the disks. It didn’t help that some of the images had 82 tracks, or 11 sectors per track, where 80 tracks and 9 sectors per track were standard. I knew that the Hatari emulator could read the images, but the ST’s graphical interface made automation difficult.

    I sought help years ago, but that didn’t come to much. I tried again the other day: hatari’s hatari-prg-args combined with the gulam shell made it work.

    You’ll probably need EmuTOS so that Hatari can emulate hard drives. I used the current etos512us.img ROM image throughout.

    First, I made a folder structure for the emulated hard disk:

    gemdos
    ├── AUTO
    ├── bclip
    ├── gulam.g
    ├── gulam.hlp
    └── gulam.ttp

    bclip is the destination folder. For each disk image, I modified the c:\gulam.g startup file to read something like:

    mkdir c:\bclip\m668
    cp +t -r a:\* c:\bclip\m668
    exit

    that is: make a new folder for the disk image, then copy all the files recursively (keeping original timestamp, with the ‘+t’ option) there.

    Here’s the shortest working command line that will copy the files then exit the emulator:

    hatari-prg-args -q --harddrive gemdos --sound off --disk-a FaST_Club_Mono_Clip_Art_668.st -- gemdos/gulam.ttp "exit"

    If you’re transferring a lot of disk images, you probably want to add some speed-up options to the Hatari command line. For my batch conversion job, I added:

    --fast-forward 1 --cpuclock 32 --fast-boot 1 --fastfdc 1 --protect-floppy on

    The whole disk contents are now in the gemdos/bclip folder:

    gemdos/bclip
    └── m668
        ├── bin.img
        ├── books.img
        ├── bowl.img
        │        ... 
        ├── clothing.017
        │   ├── babyshoe.img
        │   ├── blouse.img
        │   ├── boot.img
        │        ... 
         etc.

    This process allowed me to batch-convert most of FaST Club’s Mono Clip Art collection and put it up on the Internet Archive in a readable format: FaST Club Mono Clip Art Selection

  • Adding the date to Sony Mavica FD-91 images

    20 years ago, this was one state-of-the-art brick:

    Sony Mavica FD-91: a camera with a floppy drive, or a Sovet brutalist monument? Discuss (briefly)

    The only way to get pictures from it is via the floppy disk drive on the side. Then you’ve got a bunch of images with 8.3 filenames and the only metadata being the date saved from the camera’s clock. I’d written about it before, but I had an event that I wanted to record with a suitable camera, so adding some metadata to the pictures became important.

    #!/bin/bash
# mavicafix - add some basic exif info to MVC-FD91 images
# scruss - 2019-12

jhead -mkexif  "$@"
jhead -ta+5:00 "$@"
exiftool -Make='Sony' -Model='MVC-FD91' -Orientation=1 -n "$@"
jhead -ft "$@"
rename '$_=lc($_);' "$@"

    What it does:

    1. uses jhead to add a minimal EXIF header containing the file modification time
    2. corrects that time (I think the Mavica expects it in UTC) to my local time
    3. adds basic make/model/which-way-up data using exiftool
    4. Corrects the file modification time back to the stored EXIF value
    5. renames the files to all lower case.

  • Digital Photo Archaeology: featuring hardware DRM from the crypt

    So I picked up this large boy from the MSU Surplus Store:

    Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD91 (c. 1998 CE) — yes, that’s a 3½” floppy drive on there

    You get about 7 high-resolution pictures on a disk. And high resolution by 1998 standards means this:

    1024×768 whole pixels: that’s huge! The camera is autofocus with image stabilization, so it was quite a nifty unit at the time.

    Pre-dating EXIF, its image metadata is limited. There’s an external ‘411’ thumbnail file that looks a bit like this:

    If you care to dig about in such an ancient file, I’ve got a matching image and its 411 file here: MVC-005X.zip. And manuals? Here: Sony_Mavica-FDC91-W0007229M.pdf

    Most annoyingly, the camera really only likes real Sony batteries, or it shuts down with an “InfoLithium” battery error (swearies in link). As this battery format is now used in generate photo lighting systems and Sony don’t make it any more, this may be a camera that dies from DRM before anything else.

  • the beast of the bios

    I now have a 16:9 LCD monitor for the front room computers. The Ubuntu box needed a little reconfiguration of the X Server to work perfectly, though I think the bandwidh for 1440*900 might be a bit high for my old KVM, as I’m getting some sparklies on solid colour.

    The mini-ITX box was another story. It resolutely refused to see the wider screen. Then I found out I had to update the BIOS. Yuk.

    Since Catherine is of the teacherly profession, she bought a USB floppy drive with her iMac five years ago. The drive hasn’t seen much use, but it was essential here. First I had to find a floppy that worked (discarded a couple), then I found that Windows XP’s “make bootable floppy” option doesn’t actually make a disk that boots. I had to go off to bootdisk.com to find a super-minimal floppy boot image. Once I got that, I installed the bios tool and the flash image onto the floppy, and rebooted.

    At this point I got really annoyed. The bios tool linked from all the VIA pages is too old to recognize the new bios file format, so exits with “It is not Award BIOS” error message. Once I found the right link (thanks, filupn), I was in business. Or was I?

    I then discovered that my SP13000 had its BIOS protect jumper on. This meant dismantling the box. For most PCs, it’s not such a big deal, but for mini-ITX, it’s a horror. I had to remove the DVD drive, the hard drive, the PCI card and riser and many cables just to get down to the motherboard. Putting it all back together was hard, with the expected amount of squtcha, squtcha‘ing on the cables to get everything in.

    The BIOS upgrade, the machine rebooted, and now all I need to do is update the graphics driver. Unfortunately, there are many that are described as the VIA/S3G Unichrome Pro Integrated Graphics Driver. Argh.