laurentd75 / cpc-dsktools

Utilities to read (write) from (to) disk Amstrad CPC DSK image files

README for dsktools Version 0.2.1

Introduction

Thanks for downloading dsktools. ;-)

dsktools is a set of tools for reading and writing DSK and EDSK images to real floppy disks for use with the Amstrad/Schneider CPC range of homecomputers. The main target platform for dsktools is GNU/Linux.

Current State

dskwrite is able to write images in standard formats (SYSTEM,DATA) as well as some special formats with unusual sector numbering and sector sizes and deleted data (untested). There are no options for selecting the drive, yet. Only the floppy disk in /dev/fd0 is used.

dskread is much more complete than in older revisions. It understand some copy protected formats and takes command line options for selecting drive, side, number of sides and number of tracks. See dskread -h for a list of known options.

Compiling and Installing

Just type in "make". Optionally copy the resulting binaries "dskread" and "dskwrite" to some directory in your PATH, /usr/local/bin for example. "make install" will copy them.

Usage

Straight-forward, really.

./dskread

will read the disk in drive /dev/fd0 and dump the contents into a DSK image file. For non-standard formats there are a bunch of command line options. See dskread -h for a list of available options.

./dskwrite [b]

will read the contents of a DSK image file and write it to a floppy disk in drive /dev/fd0. If you put the "b" then write will occur to side B.

Future

Future versions of dskwrite will handle different copy protection schemes, faithfully reproducing the original disk from the image. I hope to get this support as complete as it is in CPDWrite under DOS. I will also implement some command line options to make dsktools more flexible and user friendly.