Classic99 file copy

[bsnyder97]

Hello, I'm new to classic99 and have been having a blast with it. It's making me want to get back into my TI stuff. But I have a problem... I want to copy files between disks. I have tried various disk managers but they all fail. Right now I am trying to copy from a TI .DSK file on drive 1 to a FIAD on drive 4. The disk utilities program reports "string not found" and here is part of the log file from classic99:

 

Sector read: TICC drive 1, sector 204, VDP >2F00                                                                       
Sector read: drive 4, sector 0, VDP >1000                                                                              
Sector read: drive 4, sector 1, VDP >1000                                                                              
Can't read file C:\Users\micro\Desktop\classic99\DSK4\., errno 2                                                       
Can't read file C:\Users\micro\Desktop\classic99\DSK4\.., errno 2                                                      
Detected C:\Users\micro\Desktop\classic99\DSK4\AS as a TIFILES file                                                    
Sector read: drive 4, sector 2, VDP >1000                                                                              
Sector write: drive 4, sector 2, VDP >1000                                                                             
Operation not supported on this disk type.                                                                             

 

Am I doing something wrong (probably!) or does classic99 not support file copying?

 

Thanks

 

Later. . . . . .Brad

[+adamantyr]

I'm sure Mike will chime in on this one, but in the meanwhile...

 

I'm pretty certain you aren't able to use Classic99 in this manner. It frankly has the sound of a fantastic integration test, mixing disk formats up and then using an emulated application (the disk manager) to attempt to do the copying work.

 

Most of us use TI99Dir when we need to extract files from a disk image for use in Classic99.

[Tursi]

What you are trying to do won't work with the disk manager you are using. The reason is a little deep in the theory side of things, but it boils down to that very last line you pasted in the log - Operation not supported on this disk type.

 

The TI file access mechanism is based on the concept of high level operations. That is to say, you ask the disk controller to open a file, to read a record, to write a record, to close the file, and so forth. When doing this, the software needs no understanding of how the data is actually stored - it just opens the file and reads it, and the disk controller worries about which sectors the file occupies. This permits the same software to transparently access data on floppy drives from three vendors in many different formats, hard drives, remote files across a serial link as in HDX, and even the emulated "FIAD" files of V9T9 and Classic99.

 

Many disk managers, maybe even most, do file copies as direct sector access. This means that the disk manager understands the file layout of the physical diskette, and they bypass the high level commands to directly access the disk sectors themselves. When you are reading or writing to a disk image, that's fine, because the entire structure is present. But there's a problem when you want to access /Windows/ files -- the TI disk structure is missing. (Only the file itself is present, and it doesn't occupy any TI compatible sectors, it's on a Windows file system).

 

In order to accommodate common operations like directory listings (actually solely to accommodate directory listings), Classic99 provides sector emulation for the sectors that would be involved with the act of finding files on the disk when you are accessing Windows files in a directory. This is a feature-limited listing, but it works well enough for most cases. 

 

However, the disk manager, during a copy, purports to write all the sectors independently. Classic99 is doing the read because you're coming from a disk image, but it's failing at the write because it doesn't know what the disk manager means by "write to sector 2", because that operation has no meaning on the Windows file system.

 

There are some disk managers that use the file operations to copy files (Classic99 will support the high level record access, and also the mid-level file-based block access), those should work.. but it has been tricky to get compatibility for file copies to a state where I'm confident in them. Generally I recommend using a Windows tool like TI99Dir to move files between disk images and disk files. (For text files, I've also been known to load and save through Editor/Assembler, that works ).