VOGONS


First post, by NevilClavain

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Hello,

I suppose my issue might be unusual but I am hoping that someone here will be familiar with the norwegian computer Tiki-100.
I just got one but it came with only two floppies (TurboPascal on one and some text documents on the other), no system disks. However there is someone who has archived a lot of disks:
http://www.djupdal.org/tiki/program/

They are stored in .dsk format and according to the website I should be able to write them to 5.25" floppies using winimage but I am having no luck. The website also mentions 22dsk as a program to format CP/M disks (and TIKI-100 disks). I've got a lot of NOS 5.25" 360kb floppies and several old computers with 5.25" drives. And while 22dsk formats the disks and completes with "no errors" my problem is that winimage won't read any of the .dsk files.

When I try to open a .dsk in winame I get an error saying "error reading file". I've tried a few dozen .dsk now and on both my modern desktop computer and my 486 with win95 (an older version of winimage). I contacted the author of the site and he was surprised that none of the files work. They are zipped and unzip fine, so it would be very strange if the files within were corrupted somehow. I've also tried rawwrite and fdimage but noen of them work. fdimage wrote the image to the disk but the TIKI-100 couldn't make sense of it. I don't think fdimage supports .dsk 😜 Also the .dsk files appear to be working fine in the TIKI-100 emulator on the site.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I can do?

Reply 1 of 10, by Jo22

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is that winimage won't read any of the .dsk files.

I'm speaking under correction, but I believe that's because WinImage can only see "DOS" formats (FAT12/16/B/32 etc).
CP/M if memory serves, predates them. Even CP/M-86 formats can't be seen. However, WinImage should be able to read/disks these disks still.
As far as DOS utilities go, you can also try Teledisk and Disk Copy Fast.
Not sure if these really support CP/M formats, though. I guess it's trial and error. 😀

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Reply 2 of 10, by NevilClavain

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Thank you, @Jo22. That's interesting. In that case it might be impossible to transfer these .dsk files onto actual disks unless someone has written a program that SPECIFICALLY writes Tiki-100 .dsk files onto floppy disks?

Reply 3 of 10, by Jo22

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You're welcome! 😀

It depends, writing to / reading from physical disk should work with any tool that understands the *.DSK file.
However, it may not understand the data inside of it (-> filesystem ,partition type etc).
For making backups or restoring stuff it should fine, also.

It's comparable to Win32DiskImager that writes images (RAW/Binary) to SD cards, I think.
While the program doesn't know anything about Linux or EXT filesystems, it can nevertheless be used
to write an Raspbian image to an SD card.

So if the *.DSK file has no header inside (RAW image) or a known header,
22Nice, Teledisk, WinImage will be ablte to write the content 1:1 back to a real diskette.

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 4 of 10, by Caluser2000

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NevilClavain wrote:

Thank you, @Jo22. That's interesting. In that case it might be impossible to transfer these .dsk files onto actual disks unless someone has written a program that SPECIFICALLY writes Tiki-100 .dsk files onto floppy disks?

Sign up on vcfed.org they'll be able to help you out.,

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Reply 5 of 10, by Jo22

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That's a good idea. Our fellows over there are almost as friendly and helpful as us. 😉
Alternatively, also have a look at http://www.djupdal.org/tiki/emulator/ .
There you'll find an utility, ticidic V1.1, "a program that allows you to copy files in and out of TIKI-100 disk files."

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 6 of 10, by Zup

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I¡d try to use dd (Linux), rawrite or samdisk, but all these tools have to be paired with a real FDC/FDD for best results. I mean, if your disks are formatted on non standard ways a USB floppy won't be able to write them, so you should use a computer that has a real floppy (connected via the usual 34 pin cable).

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Reply 7 of 10, by NevilClavain

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Thanks a lot to everyone that replied. I've had some more time to experiment, but I've still not managed to get a .dsk file onto floppy. But I've not tried samdisk or using a linux-machine yet (as @zup suggested).
@Jo22 The problem might be that the files has a header? WinImage certainly struggles (fails) and every other program I've tried results in unreadable disks. Perhaps It's possible to rename the file to .bin and get better results? I now have TWO tiki-machines but I'm still a little lacking on the software front. I do understand that files can be transfered to the machine using a serial cable. That might be a last resort, but seems like a hassle 😜

I will post on vcfed as suggested by @Caluser2000. Perhaps there are Tiki-users there 😀

Reply 9 of 10, by derSammler

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I've downloaded some of the disk files. They are ordinary raw disk dumps that rawread/rawrite, WinImage etc. uses as well. However, the disks have an unusual size of exactly 200 kb, which has no equivalent on a PC. That's why you can't use them. CP/M used many weird disk formats. In this case, they probably used different rotating speeds for the inner/outer tracks, so that they got 200 kb instead of the normal 180 kb.

Look here, it should help:
http://www.z80.eu/transfercpm.html

Reply 10 of 10, by Per

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derSammler wrote on 2019-10-16, 18:39:

I've downloaded some of the disk files. They are ordinary raw disk dumps that rawread/rawrite, WinImage etc. uses as well. However, the disks have an unusual size of exactly 200 kb, which has no equivalent on a PC. That's why you can't use them. CP/M used many weird disk formats. In this case, they probably used different rotating speeds for the inner/outer tracks, so that they got 200 kb instead of the normal 180 kb.

Look here, it should help:
http://www.z80.eu/transfercpm.html

It's fortunately not that bad, the only particular thing is 10 sectors per track and maybe some hardware sector interleave. Otherwise it's similar to the regular 180KB/360KB low-level format.

I typically use something like Mike Brutmans DskImage (check out https://www.brutman.com/PCjr/diskette_handling.html ). The only catch is that the floppy needs to be formatted with 10 sectors per track in advance, and there are few tools on PC that will do that for you. Maybe 22Disk?