A Python program to make Atari ST floppies #Python #Atari @bbbradsmith
How do you make a floppy that would work in Atari ST single and double sided disk drives?
Brad Smith has written the Python program makeflop.py which fills side 1 up before writing side 2 to make such disks compatible with both types of drives.
This fork of makeflop.py is modified to favor filling up side-1 of a disk image before side-2, allowing the creation of Atari ST disk images where the files can be separated for use by single and double sided drives.
The process of preparing the image is to start with the blank special-format image, add all files for side 1, then use close_side1() to temporarily reserve the rest of the side. After this, all new files and folders will be added to side 2 instead. Once finished placing things on side 2 use open_side1() to remove the reservation, and permit any remaining space to be used in a normal double-sided way.
For example, you can create a SIDE2 folder, which will work normally in a double sided drive, and a user with a single sided drive would know to avoid. For the single sided drive, trying to open this folder will create a read error, after which that folder will appear empty.
This works because even when using a single sided drive, TOS will still identify a double sided format disk, and correctly addresses clusters by side. This means that a single sided drive can access any files or directories that are only stored on side 1 clusters of the disk.
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