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Oricutron HFE

Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:54 pm
by Steve M
Could Oricutron be used to load HFE files? Could it then be used to produce a disk image from the HFE file?

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 1:29 pm
by iss
No, Oricutron doesn't support HFE file format at all, so far.

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 3:17 pm
by Chema
iss wrote: Fri Mar 19, 2021 1:29 pm [...] so far.
That is the spirit!

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 6:03 pm
by xahmol
Would love HFE support in Oricutron!
(Even better would of course be native DSK support on the Cumana Reborn)

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 6:40 pm
by Chema
In fact it does not need to support hfe directly, but any container format for which a conversion already exists. As I said before, Amstrad edsk is rather similar to Oric dsk and the HxC software can convert from hfe to it.

I put some links do information in some other post.

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 11:49 pm
by Steve M
Thanks . I'll look it up again.

I just thought that as Oricutron was the main emulator these days it'd maybe be a good idea to have it able to use Hfe files - what with all the Gotek and Cumana Reborn users. The software on those doesn't offer an easy way to convert to Dsk image - but maybe Oricutron could via copying files across from an Hfe 'disk' to an Oricutron Dsk.

If this was possible I think it'd also be useful if you could add a blank disk as easily as you could on Euphoric.

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2021 1:12 am
by Chema
Mmmm... not sure I explained myself properly. I agree with you, Steve. It would be great if Oricutron supported hfe, I was just stating that, as a maybe easier alternative, it could support esdk, for which there is already a two-way conversor.

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2021 2:24 am
by ThomH
My emulator supports both CPC-style [e]DSK and HFE, from which experience probably the only helpful things I have to say are:

CPC DSK encodes things like CRC errors through the status bytes an 8272 would produce if it were to read them. It's a bit of a hassle, and difficult to verify, but not too much of an obstacle.

HFE is more of a mixed bag; the author doesn't approve of emulator usage and that's why no specs have been officially published since revision 0 of 2012. But the documented version is extremely straightforward.

Both improve on standard Oric DSKs by not requiring you to guess where the sync marks are, which is nice.

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2021 12:48 pm
by Chema
ThomH wrote: Thu Apr 29, 2021 2:24 am My emulator supports both CPC-style [e]DSK and HFE
This is really nice! I think that eDSK is quite similar (albeit more powerful?) to the Oric DSK, so conversion/migration should not be that difficult. I know it could be a nightmare to convert all our games in all the repos, but if the emulator supports both and a conversion tool is provided, it is a matter of using the format you prefer.

eDSK is directly supported in flashfloppy and HxC firmwares (Gotek, HxC, Cumana Reborn, ...), the HxC software supports conversion to and from HFE and it is already supported in the Oric core for MiST, MiSTer and other FPGA-based solutions.

The only drawback is it is not supported in Cumulus, but it is about time we have a look at its firmware, isn't it? :wink:

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2021 4:27 pm
by ThomH
Chema wrote: Thu Apr 29, 2021 12:48 pm This is really nice! I think that eDSK is quite similar (albeit more powerful?) to the Oric DSK, so conversion/migration should not be that difficult.
Yes, it's a very straightforward format, with the main advantage over Oric DSK being that it's overt about marking out the sectors, so you don't have to guess where the index and data address marks are. Which means a bit more dealing with file structure but not a huge amount.

Both rely on other factored-out code where helpful but I have: complete code specific to CPC DSK handling is 387 lines; that compares with 170 for the Oric DSK and 132 for 2012-era HFE.

... and most of my CPC DSK overhead is a misfortune of my own creation; in my emulator tracks lose all original context once encoded and in this case the thing isn't smart enough to spot when a modified track can cleanly replace the original in the file holder. So it always rewrites the whole file, just in case the track is now a different size, meaning that it jumps through a lot of hoops you ideally wouldn't bother with.
Chema wrote: Thu Apr 29, 2021 12:48 pmeDSK is directly supported in flashfloppy and HxC firmwares (Gotek, HxC, Cumana Reborn, ...), the HxC software supports conversion to and from HFE and it is already supported in the Oric core for MiST, MiSTer and other FPGA-based solutions.

The only drawback is it is not supported in Cumulus, but it is about time we have a look at its firmware, isn't it? :wink:
Yeah, I added overt support when I discovered that Oric software is available for download in Amstrad CPC disk format. Which was almost certainly from the MiST Oric core repository or from a modified fork thereof. I just want to support anything a user might somehow end up having downloaded.

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Tue May 04, 2021 3:12 pm
by polluks

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2023 10:24 pm
by rampa
ThomH wrote: Thu Apr 29, 2021 4:27 pm
Yeah, I added overt support when I discovered that Oric software is available for download in Amstrad CPC disk format. Which was almost certainly from the MiST Oric core repository or from a modified fork thereof. I just want to support anything a user might somehow end up having downloaded.
I am to blame of that :-)

On the fpga, is very didifcult to deal with raw images (as each disk has a "random" number of sectors per track) and eDSK was easy to preprocess in a state machine, ending on a mfm image and knowing all the parameters.

What is your emulator? does it support OSX? if so can be very helpful for me to debug disk problems. (only had a couple of problems this years.... but fixing them was a pain.....

on the thread topic. There is another well documented preservation format SCP https://www.cbmstuff.com/downloads/scp/ ... _specs.txt

I was temnpted of using this instead of edsk... but filesize of .scp and .hfe can be hugue..... and i need as much free bram as i can.

Code: Select all

-rw-rw-r--@   1 rampa  staff   134656 29 sep  2014 Oricium12.dsk
-rw-r--r--    1 rampa  staff   527872 10 ene 22:21 Oricium12.hfe
-rw-r--r--    1 rampa  staff  3509780 10 ene 22:20 Oricium12.scp
-rw-r--r--    1 rampa  staff    97024 10 ene 22:19 Oricium12_edsk.dsk

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2023 8:46 am
by Dbug
Huge file formats are a real pain.

The thing is, I don't know of any Oric software having a special formatting made specially as a protection purpose, with faked data, etc... it's not like on the Atari ST, Amiga or Apple II where people have been creative with specially made formats, so having a super ultimate "preservation" format that makes every single disk 10 times (or more) bigger and more complex means that Oric software collections took more room, making tools to handle these formats pretty much requires having to use some dedicated libraries, but it also means that you have to convert everything when you want to use a floppy emulator.

Having to convert everything from DSK to HFE to use them on Cumana Reborn is a pain, that's one of the reasons why I like the Cumulus: I can just copy my (Oric) DSK to the SD card and get the data back without having to do any conversion.

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2023 11:00 am
by Symoon
Dbug wrote: Wed Jan 11, 2023 8:46 amThe thing is, I don't know of any Oric software having a special formatting made specially as a protection purpose, with faked data, etc...
The only one I know of is XL-DOS. Add to this it's the ancestor of Sedoric (IIRC), that's two reasons for it not being used I suppose.

Re: Oricutron HFE

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2023 11:17 pm
by Steve M
Tetrix had some weird thing where if you tried to copy the disk you got a corrupted one. There was a special master disk for making copies IIRC.