VOGONS


First post, by AppleDash

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I recently obtained a SuperDisk drive as well as a Promise FloppyMax LS-120 controller ISA card for my 486. I installed the card and the drive with the configuration appropriate to replace the normal A: drive with the SuperDisk drive (the only configuration needed that the manual states is that I need to set drive A: to "not present" in the BIOS, and the controller will take care of the rest. From my own testing, this feature seems to only detect the drive when the controller card is set to use IRQ 10, which I have done.)

It seems to work fine for reading and writing normal, already-formatted floppies, as seen here: https://appledash.org/img/superdisk-weirdness … n-superdisk.jpg

But things start to get a little... weird, when I try to format new floppies in the SuperDisk drive. Sometimes it works just fine, other times stuff like this happens: https://appledash.org/img/superdisk-weirdness … n-superdisk.jpg

When I then take this "weird" floppy and read it on another machine that has a normal floppy drive, this happens: https://appledash.org/img/superdisk-weirdness … y-on-normal.jpg

And then when I attempt to use it in the SuperDisk drive... https://appledash.org/img/superdisk-weirdness … n-superdisk.jpg

Does anyone have any idea why this could be happening? I'm kind of at a loss - I don't really see anything that could be causing this, especially intermittently.
If it helps, during the initial testing of the SuperDisk drive I had some weird behaviour where if I loaded my network card's packet driver at software interrupt 0x7E, I would suddenly start getting read and write errors on drive C:. Changing the network card to use software interrupt 0x60 seems to have cleared that up. I have the physical manual for the FloppyMax card, and can provide scans of it if needed.

Main retro system: Am486 DX4 100MHz | 128K cache | 16MB RAM | VLB Mach32 | Sound Blaster 16 | HardMPU w/ MT-32 or SC-55 | MS-DOS 6.22; no Windows

Reply 1 of 3, by bakemono

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Are you using the DOS FORMAT utility or something else? My guess is that it's writing bogus disk geometry data for some reason.

Without investigating further, a quick fix for this issue would probably be to get a disk image of a "normal" disk, and then when you get one of these weird ones just overwrite it with the disk image.

again another retro game on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/shmup-salad

Reply 3 of 3, by AppleDash

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bakemono wrote:

Are you using the DOS FORMAT utility or something else? My guess is that it's writing bogus disk geometry data for some reason.

Without investigating further, a quick fix for this issue would probably be to get a disk image of a "normal" disk, and then when you get one of these weird ones just overwrite it with the disk image.

I am using the DOS FORMAT utility - I have investigated 3rd party utilities, but none seem to exist that I can find.
That could be one way to solve the problem, but I'd prefer to actually get to the bottom of the issue.

derSammler wrote:

I used an LS-120 back then when it was released. Afaik, you need to use FMTLS120.EXE to format LS-120 disks in DOS.

I am formatting 1.44MB floppies, not LS-120 disks.

I am also considering just abandoning the idea of using the internal drive, and switching to an external parallel drive. This system already has a Zip drive in the second external 3.5 bay, so I unfortunately cannot use the SuperDisk drive as a secondary drive instead of the primary floppy.

Main retro system: Am486 DX4 100MHz | 128K cache | 16MB RAM | VLB Mach32 | Sound Blaster 16 | HardMPU w/ MT-32 or SC-55 | MS-DOS 6.22; no Windows