Emax

> > Thanks.  I am waiting on a disk from emulator archive.  If that doesn't
> > work, I guess I'll have to replace the floppy drive.

> While you are waiting it may be worth it to put a floppy disk cleaner
> through your EMAX.  I had a time where I thought my EMAXII floppy had
> crapped out only to clean it and it worked fine ever since.  At least this
> way if the disk from emulator archive doesn't work you know you need a new
> floppy.  I don't think your OS disk made on the PC will work.

You can make Emax boot disks on the PC.  If you're using Windows 98, it
helps if you hit F6 to get the boot menu while it's starting up, and
choose "Command Prompt" to get it into DOS mode.

Another handy hint is to make a "Windows Startup Disk" which is a boot
floppy with CD-ROM drivers on it.  This will, again, start you up in DOS
mode.

Make sure that all your filenames are in 8.3 format, because EMX won't
work properly with the usual Micros~1.txt stuff that Windows does in DOS
mode.  I suspect the EMX format is pretty much just a raw disk image, and
certainly there doesn't appear to be anything peculiar about the Emax disk
format.  It would be fairly easy to write a more modern tool to read and
write Emax disks.  In fact, I think you'd be OK just using dd on a Unix
machine (Linux, xBSD, possibly OSX) - something like "dd if=/dev/fd0
of=filename bs=512 count=1440" would do it.  It breaks down like this - dd
is the command, if is the Input File - in this case, a device (the first
floppy), of is the Output File, bs is the block size (512 bytes) and count
is - guess what? - the number of blocks to move (512 bytes * 80 tracks * 9
sectors * 2 sides = 720k).  Of course, this would just be a raw disk
image, not an EMX file.

Hope this helps,
  Gordon