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davidgiven
Unable to write N88-Basic PC-98 .d88 floppies.
Background: The NEC PC-9801 has a chicken and egg problem when it comes to writing out N88-basic floppies (usually .d88 format): there are tons of images that will boot with PC-98 emulators such as NP21w and FDD emulators (if you can somehow get past the VFO problem), but due to the strange format (oftentimes being 77 track 360rpm with the N88-Basic weirdness) absolutely no PC-98 or PC imaging program will write out these disks. I decided to buy a Greaseweazle V4 to write out a disk except there's one problem, the buttons are grayed out in the software and I get some error when I try to click "Format".
When trying to write these images to a disk using the command line with the workaround for 300rpm drives, I get an error similar to #498 (good luck ever finding a 2 mode drive in the USA):
C:\Program Files (x86)\Cowlark Technologies\FluxEngine>fluxengine write n88basic -i C:\Users\Lain\Downloads\Galaga.D88 --flux_source.rescale=1.2 --flux_sink.rescale=1.2 Error: no such config field 'rescale' in 'flux_source.rescale'
Is there any trick to writing these images or are they unsupported?
It is supposed to work. Looking at the message in the status bar, it seems like an error was reported --- see View->Logs for the full text.
That said, the 'Format' button for writing a new blank disk for putting files on. If you just want to write a disk image, then pick 'Real disk' and press the 'Write disk' button (you'll be prompted for the disk image file). The UI isn't great; I have, in fact, just pushed a major update which may improve things?
The rescale trick isn't needed any more.
BTW, the 'browse files' and 'format disk' buttons should be greyed out --- that's a bug. The N88-Basic filesystem isn't understood by FluxEngine yet. If you can point me at technical data on how the file system works I should be able to add support.
Here's the layout error and this is what happens when I try to select to write it. I have no idea what the issue is or if it's an issue with my setup and all.
Same error, doesn't even attempt to write.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Cowlark Technologies\FluxEngine>fluxengine write n88basic -i "C:\Users\Lain\Downloads\Galaga.D88" D88: overriding configured format D88: forcing high density mode Error: LAYOUT: if you use a sector count, you can't use an explicit sector list
The image for reference is the Galaga image in the Neo Kobe PC-98 archive, in case you want to take a look at it: https://archive.org/download/NeoKobe-NecPc-98012017-11-17/Dempa.zip/Dempa%2FGalaga%2FGalaga%20%5BFD%20hdb%5D.zip
Got it --- the problem was actually with the d88 format reader, not the n88basic format itself.
The fix should now be building at https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine/actions/runs/4622894522; once it's done, an Artifacts box should appear at the bottom with a zipfile in it. Could you give it a try and let me know if it works for you?
There's progress, unfortunately I'm getting a different error now and it halts early on.
To make sure it wasn't my setup I wrote out a 1232kb PC-98 DOS diskette with the same drive and media that failed to write and it worked and was readable by the target machine.
