I had pre-ordered the game Hibernated 1 - Director's Cut for the Oric, because it's always nice to have some original games in boxes.
Anyway, fast forward some time, and the game is still not available, so I poked them and they answered that they actually never did any Oric game before, were struggling to make them and would be happy if I could help.
Then sent me the DSK files so I could take a look, and indeed it's a typical Pinforic game, using the old distribution (since then Chema and Fabrice made a new version for Hugo Labrande's Tristam Island adventure game which also used Pinforic, and which thanks to them now fits on one single disk (would have to go back to the 2020 discussion to see if I remember well).
Anyway, the question was how to duplicate these games, so the approach I tried was to use the PC, but all these Kryoflux, Greaslewazleafdsgjnsadfkgj etc... are not very simple to use. I tried to plug a 3" drive on my Atari Mega STe to see if I could use Fast Copy Pro, but despite the drive being properly detected it failed during the format phase... so since my Oric has a Microdisc AND a HxC connected together, and since I can play the entire game on the Oric using the HFE files loaded from the HxC, why not just make the physical floppies ON the Oric, using the two devices as A- and B-
For the boot disk, it's easy because it's SEDORIC format:
- Format a disk using the INIT A,17,42,S command to create a single sided floppy with 42 tracks of 17 sectors
- Copy the files from the SD card to the physical floppy using COPY "B-*.*" TO A
- Create an auto start with INIST followed by CLS:!INTERPR.COM
I vaguely remember that Symoon was doing some "read track" tests some time ago, not sure how far he's gone, but basically I need a small program that given a source and destination can format and copy a disk with 512 bytes per sector, ideally doing some checks to verify that data is properly copied (many floppies have damaged surface that don't read back properly).
Technically, a generic program that can do this type of format/copy/verify, for both 512 and 256 bytes per sector would be nice, because that would make it easier to automate the duplication.
Suggestions on how to do that would be welcome!