Monthly Archives: October 2020

IECHost track nibbling with a 1571 drive: troubleshooting successful

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Luigi Di Fraia

Long story short, the G64 I created earlier today doesn’t work in VICE 3.2 or 3.4 because it does not comply with the G64 format specs 🙂 I took a copy of Markus Brenner’s g2d tool that’s part of mnib … Continue reading →

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IECHost track nibbling with a 1571 drive: full disk nibbled

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Luigi Di Fraia

This afternoon I decided to put together the scenario to dump a whole disk with IECHost and my Commodore 1571 drive. I collected track data in a mixed-content log (commands + data) and parsed it to build a G64 disk … Continue reading →

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IECHost track nibbling with a 1571 drive: decoding data

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Luigi Di Fraia

A few days back I completed my first track nibbling test, so today I tried to decode the GCR data that I captured during the test. Below there’s the output of my decoding routine, showing Header blocks in GCR format … Continue reading →

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The origin of the IDX format supported by DC2N5-LC, Ultimate-64, etc

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Luigi Di Fraia

I have been made aware of claims that the IDX format has its origins in somebody else’s work and they were not credited for their original idea. Let me put the record straight: this claim is inaccurate. In pretty much … Continue reading →

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IECHost: testing whole track dumping

Posted on October 11, 2020 by Luigi Di Fraia

While working at disk nibbling, I also creates a branch in the IECHost firmware and software repos in order to implement one long standing feature: whole track dumping. A whole track can now be dumped very quickly instead of being … Continue reading →

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IECHost track nibbling with a 1571 drive: first test done!

Posted on October 8, 2020 by Luigi Di Fraia

Today I implemented the protocol to transfer a whole track with IECHost using the SRQ line of a 1571 disk drive. Compared to the test pattern and drive code echo transfers, the transfer of track data is quite time-critical so … Continue reading →

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Another DC2N5-LC completed and ready to be sold!

Posted on October 6, 2020 by Luigi Di Fraia

Today I finished testing the DC2N5-LC device I was building so it’s now ready to be sold. For the details, check my sales page and contact me if interested!

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IECHost: killer track generation code completed

Posted on October 5, 2020 by Luigi Di Fraia

As I plan to generate killer tracks for testing purposes in future, I added a command to IECHost to create killer tracks on demand 🙂The drive code side of such command is as per below: So I can now create … Continue reading →

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IECHost disk nibbling with a 1571 drive: killer track detection

Posted on October 4, 2020 by Luigi Di Fraia

As I am exploring the 1571 drive code from Nibtools, I am implementing various commands within the IECHost firmware. The ones with a comment next to them are those I tested and played around with so far: Today I decided … Continue reading →

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