The DiscFerret is a USB-based platform for archiving floppy and harddisks. It consists of both hardware and software. Magpie is the software that reads and dumps complete tracks in a file. Both the DiscFerret board and the Magpie program are produced by Philip Pemberton.
My main goal is to produce images in formats used by emulators. This means writing conversion software to other imaging formats like DMK and ImageDisk. To get an idea of what one could do with a DiscFerret, I tried to make a classification. My usage is clearly the first category, "Archiving of floppy disk images".
Note this is software only demonstrates that the magpie produced data can be converted into something useful. No guarantee it will work for you. The license for the cw2dmk code is GNU, ans the same is true for the changes and the bits I added.
Typical launch of magpie:
sudo ./magpie --verbose --drive pc525_40b --outfile dosplus.dfi -c 25I used a modified drive file "fdd525.lua", to support 40 tr. drives. Note I tested only with an old version of magpie, so this info could be outdated.
Based on the cw2dmk code I created a tool to convert the data from a dfi image to dmk image format. This is the 'dfi2dmk' in the cw2dmk-4.4-rddfi_0.1.zip package. The modified 'cw2dmk' in this package can optionally produce this format from a Catweasel card (The data format of the Catweasel and DiscFerret is (almost?) identical, only the clock frequency differs.
Typical usage dfi2dmk (reading image of double sided, single/double density disk):
./dfi2dmk -k 6 -j <dfi file> <dmk file> -v 4
Disk formats:
Last updated: 2013-02-01