Mackpar Floppy drive

[Zardoz89]

I did some little test to the implementation of the Floppy drive, and looks that works. I need to improve the test program of it.

Also, I try to use Pixelator with it. It formats, save and load correctly. Something like drawing, going to Disk option, formatting, installing PUS and saving works. Plus If you go back to Draw, and change the image, and then go to Disk option, and try to load the file, it works, restoring the saved image from disk. But when I reset the machine, or simply exit and load again dcpu-vm, when I "install" PUS filesystem in Pixelator, it erases his own data from the floppy (but not erases the whole disk). I think that is a bug on pixelator, but I'm not very sure about it. Plus it gives a error when I try to save a image (but It saves it!). It's formats, install PUS filesystem correctly, and loads correctly. There is a problem saving, that gets a error at middle of the process, only writing half of the file.

Also, I examined the disk image file with a hex editor, and is the Pixelator data correctly saved.

So the TODO list about the floppy is :

• Improve the dumb test floppy program. Actually only writes "Cleaning" in screen, and fills the whole floppy with some data that are the last words of the program data. Should to fills the disk with some pattern to test the writing and say "Disk filled" when it finish. Now read it and check that the pattern it's correct and say it when it finish.
• Implement the Bad Sector bitmap
• Add pertinent options in main.cpp to load a arbitrary floppy image.

[Zardoz89]

I actually improved a lot the test program. Now does what I said. Also, I fixed a bug that when the floppy get the command of read, instead try to write on it, erasing all data. I fixed it. The test program works well, but Now Pixelator, can't read well his own data, and I don't know why.

[Zardoz89]

I did some bugfixes in the floppy drive code and the test program. I can very that the data write/read from the floppy it's ok.

• Pixelator, looks that aborts the write process at half with these error, but the read process works well.
• SimpleOS reads the disk file with the test pattern, putting it directly to the screen.

[lamogui]

Founds problems : there were confusion between what the drive read and what he put on the ram :

• now he read WORD by WORD
• A sector size is 512 BYTES (like real floppy)
• You need 512 BYTES (256 WORDS) to read a sector
• You send 512 BYTES (256 WORDS) to the drive when he write them to the disk
• A real floppy have 80 tracks x 2 faces so i put an option to write 160 tracks floppy which size 1.44 KBytes

Exemple if i have 0xFFAA, 0xBEC0 on a dsk i will have 0xAAFF,0xBEC0 on the ram (inverse endian) AND NOT 0x00ff, 0x00AA, 0x00BE,0x00C0

[Zardoz89]

Check it with Pixelator. The last time that I tested it (like a month) was working without problems.

[lamogui]

I made a Big mistake i just found the doc of the drive here http://dcpu.com/floppy-drive/ It specified that floppy sectors contains 512 WORDS, i will change that

[lamogui]

In fact the notch spec are not compatible with standart floppy

[lamogui]

I corrected my mistake now pixelator save/load work well !

[Zardoz89]

Thumbs up!

[lamogui]

Implementation of bad sectors finished

[Zardoz89]

Thumbs up! ^2