I have found even more reasonable parameters for the SORD M68 CP/M-68K disk. I have written a similar article in the past, but I am posting it as a new article.
I received a disk image of CP/M-68K (here called cpm68k_image.hfe) from a kind person on Facebook, and I would like to access this disk using cpmtools.
The disk image I received was in hfe format for the HxCFDD emulator.
As it is, the disk image in hfe format is basically useless except for booting with SORD M68 with FDD emulator. So, first, run the HxC utility HxCFloppyEmulator.exe to convert it to a raw sector image. This is easy to do, load cpm68k_image.hfe into HxCFloppyEmulator.exe, go to Floppy image->Export disk/Save As, and select "IMG file(RAW Sector file format)" as the file type on the save screen. )" as the file type on the save screen. Select "IMG file(RAW Sector file format )" as the file type on the save screen. This time, the file name is cpm68k_image.img.
The FDD installed in the SORD M68 is the Mitsubishi M4854-342M (there is also a version without a branch number). The main feature of this FDD is that it can be run with almost the same parameters as an 8-inch FDD.
This feature is evident in HxCFloppyEmulator's Track Analyzer, which can analyze disk images as 5.25" 96TPI or 8" 48TPI without any problem.
This Track Analyzer provides so much data that I have not been able to use it. However, the values you can easily get from this utility are the number of heads, number of tracks, sector size, number of sectors, and skew values.
From cpm68k_image.img, the number of heads was 2, the number of tracks was 77, the sector size was 256, the number of sectors was 26, and the skew was 13.
Next, download cpmtools (http://www.moria.de/~michael/cpmtools/).
). This tool is also available for Windows, but I used the Linux version on WSL2. After extracting the files, open diskdefs, the disk definition file, in an editor and add the following entries.
diskdef m68disk
seclen 256
tracks 154
sectrk 26
blocksize 4096
maxdir 317
skew 13
boottrk 2
os 2.2
end
The space to the left of the seclen is a tab, otherwise, an error will occur.
"tracks" is the number of tracks, but since the number of heads is 2, it seems to be 77 x 2 = 154.
What bothered me was determining the value of maxdir. This problem is not a hardware problem of FDD, but a problem of CP/M disk structure. Normally, maxdir is 64, 128, 256, 512, etc., and I don't think it should be a half-baked value like 317 as shown above, but I can see the contents of the disk with this.
From the prompt, type the following to see the contents of the disk.
>cpmls -f m68disk cpm68k_image.img
The contents of cpm68k_image.img contains a large number of files. It contains both an assembler and a C compiler.
AR68 .68K 16K 97 R
AS68 .68K 44K 352 R
AS68INIT. 8K 34 R
AS68SYMB.DAT 8K 44 R
BACKUP .SUB 4K 1 R
BOOT .SYS 8K 34 R
C .SUB 4K 1 R
C068 .68K 32K 252 R
C168 .68K 36K 261 R
CC .SUB 4K 1 R
CLIB . 68K 519 R
CLINK .SUB 4K 1 R
COPYDISK.68K 20K 132 R
CP68 .68K 16K 125 R
CPM .H 8K 53 R
CPM .SYS 132K 1040 RS
CTYPE .H 4K 11 R
DDT .68K 4K 15 R
DDT1 .68K 36K 270 R
DUMP .68K 8K 60 R
ED .68K 12K 94 R
ERRNO .H 4K 7 R
FORMAT .68K 20K 158 R
FUNC .68K 16K 112 R
IB .H 4K 13 R
IBLIB . 20K 156 R
INIT .68K 4K 14 R
LO68 .68K 16K 126 R
NM68 .68K 12K 67 R
PIP .68K 12K 68 R
POFF .68K 8K 56 R
PORTAB .H 4K 17 R
REBOOT .68K 20K 150 R
RELOC .68K 16K 102 R
REZERO .68K 12K 72 R
S .O 4K 8 R
SAMPLE .C 4K 5 R
SE .68K 44K 333 R
SENDC68 .68K 12K 71 R
SETJMP .H 4K 12 R
SIGNAL .H 4K 14 R
SIZE68 .68K 8K 61 R
STAT .68K 12K 73 R
STDIO .H 4K 25 R
STDRCS .68K 16K 99 R
STSCON .68K 36K 282 R
STSCON .FMT 8K 43
SYSGEN .68K 20K 131 R
SYSLIB . 4K 20 R
TOD .68K 16K 112 R
You should now be able to see the contents of the disk. Furthermore, to copy the files to your PC, type the following
>cpmco -f m68disk cpm68k_image.img 0:*.* .
By typing the above, all files on the disk will be copied to the current directory on the PC.
You can also copy them from your PC to the disk. You can also copy the files from your PC to the disk, see the cpmtools page for details.
Incidentally, I dumped the contents of the resulting CPM.SYS file, and it seems to be correct. However, the contents of text files such as STDIO.H are sometimes messed up, so I think it is still not set up correctly.
If the contents of CPM.SYS and BOOT.SYS are legitimate, we can say that the analysis of SORD M68 is one step ahead.
