> On May 18, 2023, at 3:01 PM, Joshua Rice via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> My advice: buy an old desktop computer. Buy a standard PC floppy drive (a
>> dual drive if possible to give both 3.5 and 5.25 support). Then run Linux,
>> use the "fdparm" tool to set the media format if necessary, and copy the
>> image with "dd".
>>
>> Roughly speaking this is how I read and write RX50 floppies. More
>> precisely, I usually do it with my "rstsflx" tool, which (a) understands
>> RSTS file systems so I can manipulate things at that level, and (b) knows
>> about RX50 interleaving and how to issue the ioctl that sets 10 sector per
>> track format.
>>
>> paul
>>
>
> My views exactly.
>
> I’ve had great experiences with a PIII Dell GX1. I’m most comfortable in a
> Windows enviroment, and have found both PUTR, for DOS, and Omniflop for
> Windows NT, to be perfectly suitable for writing disk images. PUTR is mainly
> for DEC
>
> As for loading in/loading out files from images, there’s likely at least
> something out there you can make use of. Even if there’s no host OS native
> software for writing directly to images, there’s almost certainly an
> emulator, which would work off disk images that can later be written to real
> hardware disks.
This is why I avoid MS products. They don't offer stuff like that, which on
Unix is a perfectly normal operation available via dd or other ways.
paul
