Hard sector format

[Jeff]

I realize that this forum may not be the right place to make this inquiry, but I have not received a response to an email that I sent.

Please verify the suitability of STM32 USB HxC Floppy Emulator Firmware for my application. I own an Heathkit H89 with an H17 hard sector controller. I intend to use a GoTEK SFR1M44-U100 3.5 Inch 1.44MB USB SSD Floppy Drive Emulator flashed with your firmware. I will use the emulator for read/write access.

One more question; how do I find an order form on the HxC2001 web site?

For sure i have responded to your email. Anyway my answer was :

<<Hello,

No i don t recommend it for the H89 / H17 for the moment since i couldn't test it on these machines

>>

[exidyboy]

Hi Jeff,

I'm back to processing a large quantity of floppies in the Vista format.

If you wanted to tweak the Northstar format to support decoding of the Vista 10 sector hard sector format for the Exidy Sorcerer (and some other machines of that era) that we were discussing above you can see how Simon Owen patched samdisk back in 2019 to support the format:

https://github.com/simonowen/samdisk/co ... 2757b1973f

He managed to reverse engineer the format without access to the following article from pages 114 and 116 of the Sorcerer's Apprentice newsletter V04 No6 (September 15, 1982) which only surfaced later but which proved the implementation correct.

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_e ... 5/mode/1up

I can of course provide a selection of Kryoflux raw preservation streams for testing of this vanishingly obscure hard sector format
So far they have all been single-sided rather than flippy disks