HxCFloppyEmulator_soft_2.1.4.0 BUG REPORT

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CoBra
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HxCFloppyEmulator_soft_2.1.4.0 BUG REPORT

Post by CoBra »

Hi Jeff,

When using RAW images of 720K floppies with 80 tracks 2 sides 18 sectors/track/side 256 bytes/sector and physical interleave 2 (physical sector numbers 1 10 2 11 3 12 4 13 5 14 6 15 7 16 8 17 9 18), HxCFloppyEmulator converts from RAW to HFE correctly (as long as correct parameters are given in the Load Raw image settings window), but when exporting from HFE back to RAW it saves the sectors without interleave (that is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18).

Is there any way to persuade it to save the sectors back in the RAW image in their original physical order?
Or open brain surgery is required for that?

Also the text on the buttons in the main window should be consistently written (all words capitalized everywhere or no caps at all), not like "Load Raw image" with last word all lowercase.

Also in the "RAW File format configuration" window "Number of Track" should be "Number of Tracks", "Sector per track" should be "Sectors per track", "GAP3 lenght" should be "GAP3 length" and also "PRE-GAP lenght" should be "PRE-GAP length" (the English word is LENGTH not LENGHT).

Text changes are a piece of cake to make, but I don't know about the physical interleave problem in conversion to RAW, is that the intended behaviour of this program or is it an actual bug?

I can always just write a damn C utility to reshuffle the sectors in the RAW image, but it seems to me that if something works one way in HxC, it should just as well work the other way too...


Thank you

Jeff
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Re: HxCFloppyEmulator_soft_2.1.4.0 BUG REPORT

Post by Jeff »

CoBra wrote:Hi Jeff,

When using RAW images of 720K floppies with 80 tracks 2 sides 18 sectors/track/side 256 bytes/sector and physical interleave 2 (physical sector numbers 1 10 2 11 3 12 4 13 5 14 6 15 7 16 8 17 9 18), HxCFloppyEmulator converts from RAW to HFE correctly (as long as correct parameters are given in the Load Raw image settings window), but when exporting from HFE back to RAW it saves the sectors without interleave (that is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18).
This is a normal behaviour. If you compare the source raw file and the new one, they must be equal.
Why do you want to change the order of the sector into the raw file ?

CoBra
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Joined: Wed Jun 01, 2016 6:46 am

Re: HxCFloppyEmulator_soft_2.1.4.0 BUG REPORT

Post by CoBra »

I did a little more digging and here's what happens:

If I take a RAW image with interleaved sectors and I convert it to HFE and then back to RAW, everything goes OK, interleave is preserved and the RAW images are identical.

If I take a Teledisk image (.TD0) with interleaved sectors and I convert it to RAW, the interleave is lost.

But with the Teledisk image loaded in HxCFloppyEmulator.exe I can see the interleaving in Track Analyzer, the sectors are displayed as 1 10 2 11 ... that is correctly. The problem appears when I try to export from Teledisk to RAW.

So the problem is when exporting from the Teledisk format to RAW format, that's when the physical interleave is lost.


I have written a pretty useful utility for handling RAW images of this particular disk format, and since the format has physical interleaving, that's how the RAW images are expected to be too. That's why I need this feature to work for conversion from Teledisk to RAW.

Thank you

Cristian

Jeff
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Re: HxCFloppyEmulator_soft_2.1.4.0 BUG REPORT

Post by Jeff »

A raw file shouldn't be interleaved... This is the job of the loader to interleave the sectors if needed.

CoBra
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Joined: Wed Jun 01, 2016 6:46 am

Re: HxCFloppyEmulator_soft_2.1.4.0 BUG REPORT

Post by CoBra »

OK, I can see what happens. No matter what, the RAW images accepted for this program should never have the physical sectors interleaved. And also that's the format they are saved when exported from different formats, right?

I don't know why, I was under the impression that when I imported some interleaved RAW images, I got some absolutely working HFE images, but now I'm not so sure about that. I just did a test and loaded an interleaved RAW image, and when I went to check with the Track Analyzer, I found the sectors had the wrong data, so it looks like you're right. I'm going to check the HFE files I generated, and see if they actually work with that 8-bit computer, I'm afraid they're not really working.... bummer.

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