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Need testers for a new utility - Simple Serial Disk Writer

westveld

westveld

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 31, 2009
Messages
177
Location
Reed City, MI
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

It's not really good enough to release, but I decided, eh, I don't care. :)

https://github.com/IntergalacticMicrosystems/SSDW

A way of sending a raw diskette image over serial to a vintage 8086+ DOS PC.

Track by track, written to disk immediately, so it's quite lightweight.

Uses bios calls for disk and screen access.
Polled IO for serial.

I believe it will work on a 5150 with 64k and DOS 2.1 and a single floppy drive.

In testing with a 5150 with a 360k drive it supported 9600 baud with a 8250 serial card and 115200 with a 16550-ish chipset card.

Thanks!

Matt
 
You say it should run on a single floppy machine. How then does the ssdwrecv code get onto that floppy? It has to live somewhere to be able to run it. So it will be overwritten by the image? Why not just use Kermit to transfer files you want? If you have to create said floppy somewhere else why not use Teledisc or Image Disk? Just questions that came to mind. I don't have any old IBM machines so don't know the particulars.
 
Yeah, at this point you need a bootable DOS disk with ssdw.com on it.

I plan to make a bootstrap app to send the ssdw.com file (via ctty maybe)

Or is there a utility that could do this with any file?
That would be cool.

Today you could get the ssdw.com file there with filemaven or intersrv, maybe laplink - I believe those can be bootstrapped over serial.

Don't need to overwrite the first disk - Load ssdw on the vintage pc, swap disks, start the transfer from the modern pc.

Hm, a prompt once run might be nice - "Please insert the disk you want to write" or something like that.
 
Plasma said:
looks cool but python is bleh
Click to expand...
I've added a zip file with the Python part packaged with the interpreter - so no Python install necessary now.

Should work back to Win7-32, but I've only tested on Win10-64

The script itself should work on Mac and Linux too, but I've not tested that.
 
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