[Simh] altairZ80 floppy disk binary files

[Malcolm Macleod]

A couple of questions about virtual-floppy-drive files under altairZ80.exe:

 

1.           SIMH's file-format for representing floppy drives

 

Can anyone point me to some information about the file-format for Floppy
Disk Drives in altairz80.exe under SIMH ??  Section A.2 of Appendix 1 of
"simh_doc.pdf" says that: "Floppy disks are represented as unstructured
binary files of 8b data items. They are nearly identical to the floppy disk
images for Doug Jones' PDP-8 simulator but lack the initial 256 byte header.
A utility for converting between the two formats is easily written".
However, I've not been able to find a description of how these files are
structured.  For example, I've noticed that when I create a blank disk in
altairz80.exe (eg by using the command "ATTACH DSK1 NEW.DSK", then
formatting it using FORMAT.COM on the supplied CPM2 disk) that the floppy
disk file seems to have an extra 9 bytes between the actual sector data, so
it doesn't seem to be just raw sector data.

 

2.           How do I mount ImageDisk (IMD) disk images under altairz80?

 

The "AltairZ80 Simulator Usage" PDF (altairz80_doc.pdf) makes reference to
IMD files being supported, but I've not been able to find any information
about how to do this.  For example - if I want to mount an existing CP/M 2.2
SSSD 8" IMD image, with 26 x 128 byte sectors, as B: (under altairz80.exe),
how do I do this?

 

Thanks,

Malcolm.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/pipermail/simh/attachments/20140922/f7c93020/attachment.html>