Olivetti M20 floppy tools, (c) Christian Groessler, [email protected]
See the file COPYING for license details.
This is a tool to access Olivetti M20 floppies and their images. Reading and writing files is supported.
type "make" some files will be compiled, generating a executable called "m20"
edit Makefile and type "make" I've tried it on Solaris/x86 and it worked, for other systems your mileage may vary. This version worked on disk images only, to access real M20 floppies you'll need Linux or NetBSD. The DOS version supports only 40track/360K floppy drives. It does not work with 1.2M drives.
In order to read and write real M20 floppies, a dd like tool which supports skipping (not by reading and discarding, but by seeking) the input and output files is needed. I use sdd by Jörg Schilling [email protected], you can find it on ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/sdd .
fdutils-5.4 for Linux, you can get it from ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/disk-management/fdutils-5.4.tar.gz or the newest version at ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/knaff/fdutils The fdutils are needed to access non-standard (e.g. 256 byte sectors) floppies, like those used on the M20.
On NetBSD, you'll need the patch in PR15199 to access non-standard floppies.
After installing fdutils and sdd, you can get an image of an existing M20 floppy by issuing the commands
setfdprm /dev/fd1 OLI320
sdd iseek=4096 oseek=4096 if=/dev/fd1 of=m20disk.img bs=256 count=1104
Please note that we're skipping the first 4096 bytes of the floppy. These are the blocks of Track 0/Head 0. Track 0/Head 0 is formatted in FM mode, which isn't readable by many PC floppy controllers.
This is no problem when reading existing M20 floppies as there seems nothing important to be stored in this area. I was able to read all files of a full disk without reading this area.
It is a problem when creating new disks on the PC as the M20 doesn't accept disks where this area is formatted differently. So you cannot create new M20 disks on the PC. What is possible is to format the disk on the M20 and then write a new image to it on the PC.
The command to write a new/modified M20 image to floppy disk is something like this:
setfdprm /dev/fd1 OLI320
sdd iseek=4096 oseek=4096 of=/dev/fd1 if=m20disk.img bs=256 count=1104
In the time between reading the image and writing the image back you can modify the image's contents with the supplied "m20" command :-)
If you start m20 w/o arguments it will print a short usage overview:
usage: m20
option can be one of
ls - list files on image
lsl - verbosely list files on image
cat - show file from image
get - get file from image
mget - get multiple files from image
put - put file onto image
mput - put multiple files onto image
rm - delete file on image
new - create a new empty image
version - display program version
Short description of the options:
ls: display contents of image (file names). Only the file names are listed, one in each line, for easy use with the mget option. e.g. m20 m20disk.img ls | xargs m20 m20disk.img mget
lsl: display contents of image (file names) in a format similar to the PCOS vl command. e.g. m20 m20disk.img lsl
cat: print contents of (ascii) file from image e.g. m20 m20disk.img cat file.txt
get: get a file from the image (i.e. copy to host file system), optionally renaming it e.g. m20 m20disk.img get PCOS.SAV (this will copy the PCOS.SAV file from the image to a PCOS.SAV file on the host file system) or m20 m20disk.img get PCOS.SAV newname.bin (this will copy the PCOS.SAV file from the image to a newname.bin file on the host file system)
mget: get multiple files from the image (i.e. copy to host file system) e.g. m20 m20disk.img get PCOS.SAV file1 file2 (this will copy the PCOS.SAV, file1, and file2 files from the image to a files with the same name on the host file system)
put: put host file onto image, optionally renaming it e.g. m20 m20disk.img put runz.batz (this will copy the file runz.batz onto the image) or m20 m20disk.img put runz.batz newname.bin (this will copy the file runz.batz onto the image and name it newname.bin there)
mput: put host files onto image e.g. m20 m20disk.img put runz.batz file1 file2 (this will copy the files runz.batz, file1, and file2 onto the image)
rm: remove files from image e.g. m20 m20disk.img rm basic.cmd file1 file2 (this will delete the files basic.cmd, file1, and file2 from the image)
new: create a fresh empty image (format disk) e.g. m20 newimage.img new (you will have to populate the image with the put command)
Nothing I know of. If you have comments/suggestions/etc., please contact me at [email protected]