Thomson TO8

gilles · **Joined:** Sat Jun 18, 2011 11:54 pm **Posts:** 24

I successfully tried Rev C of SD card HxC on TO8D (installed as units 2 & 3 in an external enclosure CD90-352).

It works ok but TO8D cannot swap units and then cannot run many games.
I'm now trying with the same enclosure as the first drive of a TO8 (without builtin fdd) with no success.
The drive is detected but only tracks 0 and 1 are accessed, then it fails in disc error or hangs.

TO8 and TO8D have the same disc controller but may differ in ROM.

I'm not 100% certain of my TO8 as I do not have a real disc drive to test, did someone else have success with basic disc operation with TO8?

Jeff · **Posted:** Sun Jun 19, 2011 12:42 am

gilles wrote:

I successfully tried Rev C of SD card HxC on TO8D (installed as units 2 & 3 in an external enclosure CD90-352).

It works ok but TO8D cannot swap units and then cannot run many games.
I'm now trying with the same enclosure as the first drive of a TO8 (without builtin fdd) with no success.
The drive is detected but only tracks 0 and 1 are accessed, then it fails in disc error or hangs.

TO8 and TO8D have the same disc controller but may differ in ROM.

I'm not 100% certain of my TO8 as I do not have a real disc drive to test, did someone else have success with basic disc operation with TO8?

With TO8D and MO5 + CD90-640 yes:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=662

For the TO8 i don't know.

About the disc change problem : can you try to eject the disk/image, wait 1/2 second and insert the next one ?

gilles · **Joined:** Sat Jun 18, 2011 11:54 pm **Posts:** 24

after some other tries, it works \o/ ... mostly...
I think I have some loose contacts somewhere or maybe resistors in the drive enclosure have a bad effect on signal level.
Now my problem is the support of double sided discs convert.
Some discs are avalaible in 2 .sap files (single sided with a basic protection preservation system) but need to be recombined in a single .hfe file. Is there a method to do that? maybe with command line tools?

raw images (or .fd) cannot be used directly as they do not preserve the interleave factor (and may also be tweaked to run with dcmoto).

One goal is to try on real hardware this piece of code http://www.pulsdemos.com/space.html . Nowadays transfering 4 double sided thomson discs on real floppy takes too much time... If I succeed, I'll put .hfe of this demo for download somewhere...

Jeff · **Posted:** Sun Jun 19, 2011 12:56 pm

gilles wrote:

after some other tries, it works \o/ ... mostly...
I think I have some loose contacts somewhere or maybe resistors in the drive enclosure have a bad effect on signal level.
Now my problem is the support of double sided discs convert.
Some discs are avalaible in 2 .sap files (single sided with a basic protection preservation system) but need to be recombined in a single .hfe file. Is there a method to do that? maybe with command line tools?

Maybe by exporting each sap file to IMG (FD) and concating boths file to make an fd file ?

gilles wrote:

raw images (or .fd) cannot be used directly as they do not preserve the interleave factor (and may also be tweaked to run with dcmoto).

You can use the "load raw image" feature to tweak the floppy disk format.

gilles · **Joined:** Sat Jun 18, 2011 11:54 pm **Posts:** 24

that is more or less what I did, the disc is readable but loader complains about "sector error". I used the 2 discs (2 discs concatenated in a 1.2Mb file) images splitted with some 'dd' under linux.
I have some sap2fd tools somewhere, I'll try to convert with my tools.

For another related subject I need to know if .hfe file format is durable and may not change in future releases of firmware?

Jeff · **Posted:** Mon Jun 20, 2011 7:19 pm

gilles wrote:

that is more or less what I did, the disc is readable but loader complains about "sector error". I used the 2 discs (2 discs concatenated in a 1.2Mb file) images splitted with some 'dd' under linux.
I have some sap2fd tools somewhere, I'll try to convert with my tools.

For another related subject I need to know if .hfe file format is durable and may not change in future releases of firmware?

i think that a special should be made (SAP dsk1+SAP dsk2 -> HFE). This can be easily done from the linux command line tool.

About the HFE yes it will probably change, but the converter will support older version (as today). By this way you can switch older HFE to the new HFE format easily.

gilles · **Joined:** Sat Jun 18, 2011 11:54 pm **Posts:** 24

I'm trying to hack from svn sources. compiled under linux ubuntu 11.04 with the safe option.
cannot convert to HFE (but MFM is OK)

(sources are unmodified for now, I took last svn revision last week, maybe I should take a stable TAG revision?)

./hxcfloppyemulator_convert sp1a.sap -HFE

Code:

SAP_libIsValidDiskFile sp1a.sap
SAP file !
file loader found!
SAP_libLoad_DiskFile sp1a.sap
80 tracks, 1 side(s), 16 sectors/track,256 bytes/sector gap3:50, interleave:1,rpm:300
track file successfully loaded and encoded!
Write HFE file sp1a_sap.hfe for the standalone emulator.
*** buffer overflow detected ***: ./hxcfloppyemulator_convert terminated
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(__fortify_fail+0x50)[0x2aadf0]
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(+0xe4cca)[0x2a9cca]
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(+0xe43c8)[0x2a93c8]
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(_IO_default_xsputn+0x95)[0x9147e5]
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(_IO_vfprintf+0x15e)[0x8e82be]
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(__vsprintf_chk+0xad)[0x98f47d]
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(__sprintf_chk+0x2d)[0x98f3bd]
./hxcfloppyemulator_convert[0x8052b20]
./hxcfloppyemulator_convert[0x804992f]
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe7)[0x8c1e37]
./hxcfloppyemulator_convert[0x80493a1]

Jeff · **Posted:** Tue Jun 21, 2011 11:51 am

More backtrace please ?

gilles · **Joined:** Sat Jun 18, 2011 11:54 pm **Posts:** 24

I was just editing my message to add full backtrace

but it does not help much...

Jeff · **Posted:** Tue Jun 21, 2011 12:01 pm

gilles wrote:

I was just editing my message to add full backtrace

but it does not help much...

Seems to be in a printf...

Jeff · **Posted:** Tue Jun 21, 2011 12:08 pm

Jeff wrote:

gilles wrote:

I was just editing my message to add full backtrace

but it does not help much...

Seems to be in a printf...

Line 197, the overflow is a \0 into HEADERSIGNATURE. Not a problem in the "real world" since this byte is set to 0 later

.

If you want remove this error replace the sprintf by a memcpy.

EDIT : In fact replace the line 197 by this : memcpy(&FILEHEADER->HEADERSIGNATURE,"HXCPICFE",8);

gilles · **Joined:** Sat Jun 18, 2011 11:54 pm **Posts:** 24

in SVN trunk I have this line in 207 but it should not hurt since it's a 512byte buffer.
I suppose there is a write overflow in a malloced array before that.

Jeff · **Posted:** Tue Jun 21, 2011 10:36 pm

gilles wrote:

in SVN trunk I have this line in 207 but it should not hurt since it's a 512byte buffer.
I suppose there is a write overflow in a malloced array before that.

Yes should not, but you ask to the compiler to check the buffer... (safe option).

gilles · **Joined:** Sat Jun 18, 2011 11:54 pm **Posts:** 24

It still crashes with modified line.
But it does not if I remove -O3 compile option.

Jeff · **Posted:** Wed Jun 22, 2011 11:31 am

gilles wrote:

in SVN trunk I have this line in 207 but it should not hurt since it's a 512byte buffer.
I suppose there is a write overflow in a malloced array before that.

?

On which file ?

The file to modify is ./common/hfe_file_writer.c

HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Thomson TO8

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