[Simh] DEC floppy disk interleave questions

[Alan Frisbie]

I have a large quantity of disks that I wish to copy to files
that can be directly used by the SIMH PDP-11 emulator and by the
E11 emulator.   They include 8" floppies (both RX01 and RX02),
RL01, and RL02.

The issue is that the disks have sector sizes that differ from
the usual 512 bytes, as well as having interesting interleave
and stagger factors.   RX50 (and RX33?) disks have (I think)
512-byte sectors, but some odd track usage.   I also believe
that RX02 disks have the first track in single-density mode,
just to complicate things, but it isn't used by most DEC O/S
software.   RL01 and RL02 disks also have bad-block sectors
at the end of the disk.

I am assuming that SIMH and E11 emulate the device faithfully
enough that programs which are aware of the interleaving and
small sector sizes will work properly.   If this assumption is
wrong, please enlighten me.

If my assumption is correct, what is the best way to copy the raw
disks (which are in a variety of O/S formats) to files which the
emulators will be happy with.   I can bring up a real PDP-11 with
RX02, but will probably be using a microVAX-II with an Andromeda
FDC11-B controller and Shugart 800 drives.   I don't mind writing
my own code with QIOs.

I have a bunch more questions related to this, but this will
do for now.   :-)

All of this is related to cleaning out my storage units and
de-cluttering my life.

Alan Frisbie

--  Alan E. Frisbie               Frisbie at Flying-Disk.Com
--  4759 Round Top Drive          323-256-2575
--  Los Angeles, CA 90065