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  • Making CP/M Plus Physical Diskettes?

    From Tom Lake@tlake@twcny.rr.com to comp.sys.tandy on Wed Mar 6 18:47:34 2019
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.tandy

    Has anyone successfully made actual diskettes from the DMK or DSK images of Model 4 CP/M Plus? I can create TRSDOS 2.3, 1.3, 2.7 and 2.8 as well as NEWDOS, LS-DOS and other OS floppies that work on a real TRS-80 but I can't make CP/M Plus diskettes that will boot. I've tried creating them in an emulator that can use a real floppy drive and I've also tried SuperCard Pro which has never failed me before. My floppy controller is capable of single density and all other compatibility tests.
    If you've been able to do it, please let us know HOW!!! Thanks.
    Tom L
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  • From Tom Lake@tlake@twcny.rr.com to comp.sys.tandy on Thu Mar 7 01:01:04 2019
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.tandy

    On Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 9:47:35 PM UTC-5, Tom Lake wrote:
    Has anyone successfully made actual diskettes from the DMK or DSK images of Model 4 CP/M Plus? I can create TRSDOS 2.3, 1.3, 2.7 and 2.8 as well as NEWDOS, LS-DOS and other OS floppies that work on a real TRS-80 but I can't make CP/M Plus diskettes that will boot. I've tried creating them in an emulator that can use a real floppy drive and I've also tried SuperCard Pro which has never failed me before. My floppy controller is capable of single density and all other compatibility tests.

    If you've been able to do it, please let us know HOW!!! Thanks.

    Tom L
    What hardware couldn't do, software could!
    I use a two-step approach to create diskettes for older systems.
    First I use software made for the HxCFloppy Emulator (you don't need the HxC hardware to run the software) to convert a DMK or DSK image into an SCP image for SuperCard Pro.
    Then I run the SuperCard software in Windows 10 that uses the SuperCard Pro hardware (which I have) to create diskettes.
    That works fine for most MFM-encoded diskettes (Kaypro, TRS-80, Color Computer, TI-99/4A, etc.) but just can't make Tandy CP/M Plus disks. Instead of an SCP image, I then used HxC to convert the DMK images to IMD format and used ImageDisk to create the actual floppies. That works!
    I see that CP/M Plus uses a strange format. Track 0 is 18 256 byte sectors but the rest of the diskette is 8 512 byte sectors! I'm going to contact the maker of SuperCard Pro to see it they can make a change that will handle it.
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  • From lafos1@lafos1@gmail.com to comp.sys.tandy on Fri Mar 8 04:37:55 2019
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.tandy

    On Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 8:47:35 PM UTC-6, Tom Lake wrote:
    Has anyone successfully made actual diskettes from the DMK or DSK images of Model 4 CP/M Plus? I can create TRSDOS 2.3, 1.3, 2.7 and 2.8 as well as NEWDOS, LS-DOS and other OS floppies that work on a real TRS-80 but I can't make CP/M Plus diskettes that will boot. I've tried creating them in an emulator that can use a real floppy drive and I've also tried SuperCard Pro which has never failed me before. My floppy controller is capable of single density and all other compatibility tests.

    If you've been able to do it, please let us know HOW!!! Thanks.

    Tom L
    I did it several years ago and had to think it through again. You can make copies using David Keil's emulator. He included two sets of floppy disk definitions to access the physical hardware. The ones normally used are optimized for typical Tandy disk structures and begin with an "F". The ones you want begin with a "v", and will handle nonstandard formats, but are a bit slower. I just made a copy if disk 1 on a system with 360K floppy disk running Win98 on an Asus mobo.
    Larry
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  • From patrick.bureau@patrick.bureau@gmail.com to comp.sys.tandy on Sun Jun 16 09:37:40 2019
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.tandy

    On Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 8:47:35 PM UTC-6, Tom Lake wrote:
    Has anyone successfully made actual diskettes from the DMK or DSK images of Model 4 CP/M Plus? I can create TRSDOS 2.3, 1.3, 2.7 and 2.8 as well as NEWDOS, LS-DOS and other OS floppies that work on a real TRS-80 but I can't make CP/M Plus diskettes that will boot. I've tried creating them in an emulator that can use a real floppy drive and I've also tried SuperCard Pro which has never failed me before. My floppy controller is capable of single density and all other compatibility tests.

    If you've been able to do it, please let us know HOW!!! Thanks.

    Tom L
    Well if your us HxC to make your HFE from DSK for your Gotek drive then just get copycat 4.1 to select Gotek as a master and other drives as destination and make your cpm disk, I successfully made my R/S CPM and Montezuma CP/M boot disks that way, then copy is just simple as using copycat to copy drive to drive.
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