GST 68K cartridges preservation
Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 10:02 pm
It would be good to preserve microdrive images of the GST 68K cartridges, although their different format means that existing QL utilities won't work with them.
Dilwyn's site has copies of the programs extracted from the cartridges, apparently created by Dex.
I took a look at them and I was able to reverse engineer some info about the cartridge format (excactly 100 1-KB sectors per microdrive, each with a sector header), but the files collected by Dex seem to be missing bytes here and there. Either the GST OS performs some weird reshuffling of the files when loading them into memory or - perhaps more likely - those files are corrupted. This could happen if bytes were lost during the serial transmission. If that's the case, there are no preserved copies of the utilities beyond the original microdrives.
I have a number of ideas on how to dump these cartridges, but I don't have the cartridges themselves... would anybody that owns those cartridges be interested in helping me to create images of the entire microdrives?
Thanks!
Dilwyn's site has copies of the programs extracted from the cartridges, apparently created by Dex.
I took a look at them and I was able to reverse engineer some info about the cartridge format (excactly 100 1-KB sectors per microdrive, each with a sector header), but the files collected by Dex seem to be missing bytes here and there. Either the GST OS performs some weird reshuffling of the files when loading them into memory or - perhaps more likely - those files are corrupted. This could happen if bytes were lost during the serial transmission. If that's the case, there are no preserved copies of the utilities beyond the original microdrives.
I have a number of ideas on how to dump these cartridges, but I don't have the cartridges themselves... would anybody that owns those cartridges be interested in helping me to create images of the entire microdrives?
Thanks!