franco@iuvax.UUCP (03/16/86)
I have posted a very useful sector editor (in binary) to net.sources. It is only UUENCODED (not squeezed). Below is the documentation. franco@indiana ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE NO-FRILLS ST SECTOR EDITOR v1.01 30 November 1985 James M. Eli 74176,2137 No-Frills Documentation: The author takes no responsiblity as to the quality or performance of this software. Use this at your own risk... preferably on backup copies. You can easily render programs, or entire disks useless, believe me I know! To Run: First set your screen resolution to MEDIUM, then simply double click on the program name. The title screen will prompt to insert your working disk and press RETURN (remember: use backups). The program will now initialize and read sector '0' of drive 'A'. From here on the program will accept input in both upper and lower case. Use only the commands which are displayed, as there is limited error checking. Here is a breif description of the commands available: O Toggles between the lower and upper halves of the 512 byte sector. Each time it displays 256 bytes (1-256/257-512) in both hexadecimal and ASCII format. N New sector number to read or write. Be careful not to outstep the bounds of single (0-719) or double (0-1439) density drives. The noise this makes is enough to keep you from trying this more than once. If a sector less than 0 is requested, on the next read operation sector 0 is substituted. R Read current sector. W Write to current sector. You are given one chance to bail-out before you make a permanent change. Before going through with this operation check the drive & sector #'s, and be sure this is what you want. +/- Respectively inrements or decrements the sector number, and then reads this sector. Should (!?) not step out-of-bounds. M Modify data. Enter the location (1-512, making sure you are displaying the correct half), followed by the new byte. If a new location is not specified, consectutive bytes are accessed. Just hit RETURN when finished. Be careful now! D Drive swap. Toggle between drive A and B. P Prints the current sector in the buffer in both hex & ASCII. Dumps the data out the parallel port. B Changes the background color (Did I say no frills?). Q Quit and exit back to the Desktop. The Read and Write status returned will be '0' for successful operations. Occasionally '-1' will pop up (which means: 'Anti-Success'), just check to make sure you requested a legal sector, your media is not write protected, etc. and try again. If everything checks out you probably found a bad or missing sector (intentional or otherwise). If you have used any of the sector editors for the 8-bit line you'll have no trouble here. This program started out in Haba HIPPO-C, but was finished in the Alcyon C supplied with the developer's kit. HIPPO-C has a good programming environment which makes going from the editor to compiler to linker easy. Unfortunately HIPPO-C lacks the support in their library to make extended BIOS calls, this was the main reason to change C's. If there is enough interest in this out there, I'll consider enhancements (add drop-down menus and all that good GEM stuff), and possible future 'No-Frills' programs... how does a 'No-Frills ST Custom Formatter' sound?