New DSK container and support for Genie II&III emulator

[stefano]

Recently many interesting news about the preservation of CP/M systems were announced on the web.

I already mentioned the QX-10, but there's a lot about the TRS-80 clones too,in example this emulator for the Genie II/Genie III systems, including several system disk images.

http://www.myoldc.info/eaca_tcs_compute ... enies.html

If you look for other repositories you should find also the whole source code tree for some of them.

After fiddling around appmake trying to create a valid disk image I discovered that the right way to feed that sdltrs version was to use DMK disk images, which could be done with an external tool.
There actually are 2 or 3 tools capable of doing this, but the DMK format has good reasons to be preferred by some emulator, so I decided to add native support to "appmake +cpmdisk".

I'm sure there are many blind spots yet, but it seems to work right, so I'm pulling it.
My test case was holte CP/M 3.0 for the Genie III, which apparently is passing the Y2K test (is the emulation helping?):

$ zcc +cpm -subtype=g3holte30 -create-app today.c

genie_iii_today.png

[stefano]

The DMK container should in theory be valid also for some MSX emulator, I tried it.. no success, but it must be just a compatibility problem, because I can still convert the resulting DMK file to a valid plain disk image.

[stefano]

New version pulled. The sector sizes needed to be properly categorized, and now most of the skew conditions are properly managed.
There were many different disk formats for many different CP/M versions on the EACA systems, z88dk-appmake is not flexible enough to support all of them but now we have a reasonable coverage of the existing machines configurations.

[JenGun]

The built in RTC of the EACA EG3200 Genie III and the clock card for the TCS Genie IIIs (https://oldcomputers-ddns.org/public/pu ... lock_2.jpg) are based on the OKI MSM5832 chip, which returns only a 2-digit year: so the emulator is not "helping" ...

[stefano]

Having only two digits is not necessairly a big issue. The point is how the software (system services and/or z88dk library) converts it, obviously if the calendar gets warped it becomes quite a challenge.