I only had a cassette drive for my SVI-328 back in the eighties but there must have been lots of Expander users with a floppy disk... So I'm left wondering why no-one has made images of the floppies and distributed them? Was the floppy format too exotic to be read on modern devices? I'd like to try CP/M on Spectravideo, even if just on an emulator... :)

It's a good idea to archive the aging floppy disks.

David Dunfield's ImageDisk is great tool for this purpose, because it also stores the disk format. There's also a small util included for converting the disk images to a raw data format used by emulators.

The best result will be using a disk drive with the same characteristics as the Spectravideo drive.

Some PC floppy controllers has problems with the first track on a SVI-328 floppy which is FM formatted. Try another computer or skip the track.

ImageDisk
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/


Here are some disk images in a raw data format for use with emulators (IMD format will be later).

SVI-328 CP/M-80 v2.22 for single sided drives (SVI-905, SVI-605)
http://www.bluemsx.com/dev_download/svi328/dsk_CPMSS.zip


SVI-328 CP/M-80 v2.24 for double sided drives (SVI-605B)
http://www.bluemsx.com/dev_download/svi328/dsk_CPMDS.zip


SVI-328 Disk Basic 1.0 for double sided drives
http://www.bluemsx.com/dev_download/svi328/dsk_SVDiskBasicDS.zip

SVI-328 Z-CPR3 for double sided drives (80 column only)
http://www.bluemsx.com/dev_download/svi328/dsk_ZCPR3.zip


SVI-738 CP/M-80 v2.28 (use updated SVI disk ROM)
http://www.bluemsx.com/dev_download/svi738/dsk_svi738cpm.zip

SVI-738 MSX-DOS
http://www.bluemsx.com/dev_download/svi738/dsk_svi738msxdos.zip


For curiosa, the source code for the Spectravideo CP/M CBIOS can be found here.
http://www.hansotten.com/msxsw.html

Whoa! Many thanks for the bluemsx.com/dev_download link! As I said I was a "cassette lamer" back in the day and never actually saw CP/M or even Disk Basic for the SVI before... :)

-Henri
http://www.vilminko.net/henri/

"Some controllers" ? I think I have tried at least 20 floppycontroller cards (ISA) and still haventy been able to write an spectravideo floppy correctly :(


(Yes, I grab cards with floppycontrollers on then whenever I see them :)

Actually there's no guarantee that the card can handle FM just because it's old, for example the Pentium 3 generation with a motherboard that has an FDC chip from SMSC will work.

There is also an option for skipping a track in ImageDisk but then you won't get all the system tracks (track 1-3 on the first side) and have to SYSGEN the disk to make it bootable.

Some more hints can be found here:

Tim Mann's TRS-80 FAQ
http://www.tim-mann.org/trs80faq.html#[15]

There is a util called TestFDC that you test your FDC capabilities. Don't miss the Registry where can see controllers that handles FM and also report your own findings.

http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/