CD-i floppy inventory

Last weekend I future-proofed my CD-i floppy collection. A bit to my surprise, all floppies except one turned out to be perfectly readable (nearly twenty years after they were last written!). Luckily, the one exception was a backup copy so I didn’t lose any contents.

I had originally intended to use the borrowed CDI 182 unit for this (it has two floppy drives). The primary motivation for this was that my unstowed CDI 605 could not read beyond track zero of any floppy, but after giving the matter some thought I decided to try my other CDI 605 first, the primary motivation for this being speed (see below). It turned out that this 605 could read the floppies perfectly, including the three 38U0 format ones that gave problems on the 182 unit. Microware has defined a number of OS-9 disk formats for floppies, the 38U0 one supposedly being the “universal” 3.5" format (there is also a 58U0 “universal” 5¼" format).

The problem with the “universal” formats is that track zero can be (and on my floppies, is) in a different density which makes it a bad fit for most tools, both on CD-i and PC. It also means that only 79 tracks are used for data storage, giving a raw capacity of 79 × 2 × 16 × 256 = 632 KB. The 3803 format used by all my other CD-i floppies uses all 80 tracks and consequently has 8 KB more of raw storage for a total of 640 KB (these are both double-density, double-side formats (DS, DD) with 16 sectors of 256 bytes per track like nearly all OS-9 disk formats).

Before unstowing my other CDI 605 (it was nearly at the bottom of a 150 cm stowed equipment stack) I tried reading the floppies with my trusty old Windows 98 machine which still has floppy drives. I could not quickly find a DOS tool that handled the 256 byte sectors (not even raread and friends), although I suspect that Sydex’s TELEDISK product would have handled it just fine. I also tried Reischke’s OS9MAX which should handle all OS-9 formats under the sun according to its documentation. The demo version ran under MS-DOS and gave me working directory listings, even for the 38U0 floppies, but it does not support actually reading the files and I am somewhat doubtful about the current availability of the paid-for full version (even apart from cost concerns).

Why did I decide to use the 605? It was not a question of reading the disks (the 182 did this mostly fine) but of handling the data thus read. The 182 unit has a SCSI connector but I have no drivers for it (yet) and dumping my full floppy collection over the serial port did not really appeal to me for speed and reliability reasons (it could have been done, of course).

The 605 player has a SCSI connector and includes drivers for it so I could have just connected it to the SCSI disk in my E1 emulator and copied the floppies to hard disk (I would still have needed to transfer them to my laptop which would have been a two-step process via the Windows 98 PC as I have no SCSI connection on my laptop).

Instead I used the BNC network connector of the 605 to directly transfer floppy images to my laptop (it needs a network switch supporting both a BNC connector and the modern RJ45 connectors, but luckily I have two of those, even if they are only 10 Mbit/s). Starting up the network environment of the 605 took only two OS-9 commands at the command shell prompt:

ispmode /le0 addr=10.0.0.120
mbinstall

After this I could just ftp in to my laptop where I ran ftpdmin, a very minimal ftp server program, and transfer floppy disk images directly:

ftp 10.0.0.110
bin
put /d0@ floppy.dsk

(where /d0@ is the raw floppy device, for 38U0 I used /d0uv@, both are built-in for the 605).

The transfers ran at the maximum speed of the floppy drive (way below the 10 Mbit/s network speed), and the resulting .dsk files are perfectly readable using the –v option (virtual disk) of Carey Bloodworth’s os9.exe program even though that program was originally written for Tandy Color Computer OS9/6809 floppies (the floppy disk format was not changed for OS-9/68000 which is at the core of CD-i’s CD-RTOS operating system).

For easy access I also created a “tar” format archive of each floppy on a RAM disk:

chd /d0
tar cvf /r768/floppy.tar .

and ftp’d those to my laptop as well (the /r768 device is a 768 KB variation of the /r512 built-in 512 KB RAM disk device of the 605 player).

I ended up with the following collection of unique floppy disk images:

• 605h3 - 605 H3 Driver Update (1 floppy)
  
• 605upd - 605 Driver Update (1 floppy)
  
• bcase - Basecase Tests (1 floppy)
  
• eboot41 - Emulation Boot Diskette (1 floppy)
  
• eburn41 - Emulation and CDD 521 Boot Diskette (1 floppy)
  
• inet - CD-I Internet Installation Disk - V1.3 (1 floppy)
  
• nfs - OS-9/68000 Network File System V.1.0 (1 floppy)
  
• os9sys - OS-9 System Diskette (1 floppy)
  
• pubsoft - OptImage Public Domain Software (2 floppies)
  
• pvpak - OptImage Preview Pak Installation Disk (1 floppy)
  
• ubridge - OS-9 UniBridge Resident Utilities (3 floppies)
  

The 605* and eb* floppies are mostly interesting for CD-i 605 or E1 emulator owners, but the bcase floppy contains a set of CD-i standard conformance test programs that.

The inet and nfs floppies contain a full set of Internet software including Telnet and FTP servers and clients and an NFS client (all except the latter are also in the 605 ROMs).

The os9sys floppy contains a full set of Professional OS-9 programs and is my original source for most of the OS-9 CD-i disc that I described earlier (most of these are not in ROM on any CD-i player that I’ve seen so far).

The pubsoft floppies contain miscellanous utilities such as bfed, du, kermit, umacs and vi, most of which can be obtained elsewhere, some CD-i specific utilities such as da (CD-i disk analyzer) and iffinfo (CD-i IFF file dumper) as well as library source files for the CD-i IFF file library.

The pvpak floppy contains preview software for CD-i images that will preview CD-i IFF files from an NFS-mounted host file system directory.

The ubridge floppies are the goldmine (and also the 38U0 format ones) as they contain a full set of native Microware C compiler/assembler/linker/debugger software for OS-9 complete with CD-i header files and libraries and C runtime startup sources. Both the srcdbg and sysdbg debuggers are included as well as the rdump utility for dumping ROFF (Relocatable Object File Format) files.

Unfortunately, most of the above software except for the pubsoft contents is copyrighted property of Microware (now Radisys) or OptImage (a former Philips/Microware joint venture) which means that I cannot distribute it, even though they could be very useful to CD-i homebrew developers. For that the hopefully soon-to-be available GCC cross-port will have to be enough...

While investigating all of the above I also stumbled upon a 450 MB OS-9 hard disk image for MediaWorkshop. The os9.exe program recognizes it just enough to say that it does not support it so I have no real idea about its contents except the obvious.

To remedy that problem I’m in the process of adding SCSI disk support to CD-i emulator so that I can use the SCSI support in the CD-i 605 ROMs to mount the disk image and look at it. This should also allow the CD-i 180 to boot from a SCSI disk if I ever find drivers for it (a possible path to that has just appeared, we’ll see...).