non-DEC-compat HW to read RX02's?

[Lyle Bickley]

On Saturday 09 May 2009, Steven Hirsch wrote:
> On Sat, 9 May 2009, Steven Hirsch wrote:
> > On Sat, 9 May 2009, Tim Shoppa wrote:
> >> What non-DEC-compatible stuff out there can read RX02's?
> >
> > I'm sure a Catweasel can do it, but doubt that anyone has written the
> > necessary support software.
> >
> > I just purchased one and hope to gain some experience writing drivers.
> > Unfortunately the API documentation is not very helpful.  Tons of
> > nitpicky detail with absolutely no overview, theory of operation or
> > context in general.  Not to fault the designer, but it's the kind of
> > thing that's easy to end up with when you know the subject so well
> > that the "big picture" is obvious to you, but need a reference for the
> > low-level details.
>
> Found an open source Catweasel driver for Linux, and the sources are
> extremely helpful in deciphering its operation. Following a link from
> the page, I tripped over:
>
> http://www.tim-mann.org/catweasel.html
>
> Most of the verbiage deals with its use in reading and writing TRS-80
> formats, but buried in the docs was the news that it can read and write
> RX02 formats.

Yes, Tim did a lot of excellent work on the Catweasel driver.

Unfortunately, there is something buggy in the RX02 reading and/or writing. 
I tried reading multiple RX02 diskettes with Tim's software - and it 
created images w/o reporting errors. However, when I attempted to re-create 
RX02s from the images, it did so - but the newly created diskettes were NOT 
readable by a real RX02.

I emailed Tim about this at the time, but IIRC, he didn't have an RX02 
available to do testing against the "read thing". Tim asked me to collect 
some debugging data - I did so, bot ended up dropping the ball when I my 
non-hobby work load went crazy (it still is)...

Lyle
-- 
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com
"Black holes are were God is dividing by zero"