Hello Everyone....
I am hoping to be able to do the programming for this project in Delphi
so please bear with me as I explain the project.
I have numerous files for a legacy computer called a Timex-Sinclair 2068
which are on diskettes that are formatted under a system called LARKEN
DOS. I am wondering what would be involved in creating a program that
would ****t program saved on LARKEN formatted diskettes to emulator TAP
files. Information on the format of LARKEN diskettes can be found at:
http://www.timexsinclair.org/2068/peripherals/Larken/larkdisk.html
Gerton Lunder made the structural details of his TAP files available
in his manual for the Z80 emulator.
It seems to me that it is just a matter of grabbing the information
from the LARKEN diskette and putting it into the appropriate part of a
TAP file. I have it pretty much figured out from where to grab from
the diskette and where to put in the TAP file. What I don't know is
how to make my programs tell the disk drive how to pull information
from a non IBM formatted diskette. Can someone here help me on this
angle?
If I do this project, I will most likely do it in Borland Delphi or
Turbo Pascal which are two languages I understand the best. I am
not sure how easy it would be to develop a program that works within
one of the emulators itself. I would suspect that even in assembler
it would involve a high memory overhead. (I, myself, have little
knowledge of Z80 assembler programming but I do program in HiSoft Pascal
(which is almost ISO compliant version of Pascal) which compiles into
pretty well optimized mc.)
I feel that if this is to be done, it should be done soon. The
passing of time is not doing my 5.25" drives any good and I am sure
the the diskettes must be degrading too. If I can develop a program
that works, I would be willing make it available to all who have an
interest in it.
Thank you all in advance,
David Solly
