young@pur-ee.UUCP (Mike Young) (07/09/88)
Greetings! I have a Xerox 820-1 I'm trying to upgrade to double density, using the WD 2793 controller (yes, and the Emerald Microware upgrade kit). It runs CP/M 2.2, and does it very nicely. It occurs to me that I will need a format program to handle double density. I could write one, but if someone else has invented this particular wheel, why should I? :-) In addition, the CBIOS will also need to know how to select the proper density, keep track of who's double and who's single at any given moment, etc. (this particular system will have 2 to 4 5 1/4" DSDD drives on it, and I need to do a LOT of single -> double copying) I suspect someone's already addressed this task, and again I don't see the need to dig into the beast if it's already been done, so.... Any comments? -Mike Young young@eg.ecn.purdue.edu ..!pur-ee!young
mlinar@eve.usc.edu (Mitch Mlinar) (07/10/88)
In article <8480@pur-ee.UUCP> young@pur-ee.UUCP (Mike Young) writes: > I have a Xerox 820-1 I'm trying to upgrade to double >density, using the WD 2793 controller (yes, and the Emerald Microware >upgrade kit). It runs CP/M 2.2, and does it very nicely. It occurs >to me that I will need a format program to handle >double density. I could write one, but if someone else has invented this >particular wheel, why should I? :-) > > In addition, the CBIOS will also need to know how to select the >proper density, keep track of who's double and who's single at any given >moment, etc. (this particular system will have 2 to 4 5 1/4" DSDD drives There are a couple of ROMs sold for the 820-I which have a number of utilities associated with them. One is the Xpro MicroCornucopia ROM and the other is the MicroCode Plus2 ROM. The Xpro is super-cheap since it has few features in it. Plus2 is about $40(?) but has about 11 formats built-in, a way to define user-definable formats, and can read/write MS-DOS disks through Bridger Mitchell's DosDisk program. There are a bunch of other features Plus2 has that Xpro does not; Xpro only comes with ROM, BIOS, FORMAT, and SYSGEN. I will have to warn you that I am a tad biased, though, since I wrote the ROM and all utilities for it. -Mitch