Hi There,

I'm having an issue with the FDSLoadr program, that I think you folks could probably clear up very quickly.

I made the Ram Adapter-PC cable and it works great.

So, I made the FDS-PC cable a couple nights ago and I am trying to get it to work now. The confusion is when you start the program. See, when you start the fdsloadr.com program you must use a command line command with the program name followed by the .fds file name. Like this:

fdsloadr.com dokidoki.fds

Then the program starts up in RAM adapter or DiskDrive Unit mode depending on which cable is connected.

Now in RAM adapter mode, that is fine, cuz that command line specifies what file to load onto th FDS RAM adapter. When you use the other cable (the FDS Unit-PC cable) you can a) dump a disk, or b) load a .fds image onto a disk (if you have a writeable drive). If I had a writeable drive (which is now on its way to me), I could easily use that same command line command to load a .fds image onto a disk. However, I don't understand how I am supposed to start the program when I just want to READ a disk and dump it to the PC, since I have to specify a file name. How can I specify a file name if I haven't dumped it yet?

Well, I read to the last page of the docs that come with fdsloadr and it mentions that I am supposed to create a valid fds image with a 16-byte header. Uhhhh, uummm, ok. How do I do that? I haven't the slightest clue.

So I guess I have to make this file first, name it, use it in a command line command, dump the disk, and save it to the file name I created....or something.

Well, anyway, hope you can help. :-) I really appreciate it!

Yours,
Rob

"How can I specify a file name if I haven't dumped it yet?"

Does it also specify that the file has to exist? If not, I'll guess that the manual is telling you to specify a file name to which the dump will be written.

Well, I'd already thught of that.When you do that it says that it can't open the file, so that's not it. ;-)

It seems the program won't start unless a .fds file with a valid header is specified.

-Rob

Try these:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/memblers/blank.zip

The files are completely blank except for the header. There's ones for 1, 2, and 4 disk sides.

Let me know if it works. I haven't done much with the FDS, I'll try it if I can find a RAM adapter sometime.

Thanks, Memblers.

I'll give those a shot. Also, Brad Taylor, the author, just got back to me on this and said:



"for acquiring the contents of a FDS disk from the drive, you may either:

1) create the 16-byte header file. you probably won't need to do this.

2) specify a existing FDS image that matches the # of sides of which the FDS disk game being acquired has. the FDS file's contents will then be overwritten with the newly acquired data. don't forget to hit F2 on exit to update the specified FDS file with the new disk contents.

Creating the 16-byte header has to be done in some sort of low-level hex editor application, but this would only be neccessary if you needed to acqiure an amount of disk side images into a single FDS file that exceeded the amount of other common ones (usually these have just one or two disk side images, with each side equivelant to approximately 64K bytes of data).

The DOS EDIT program can be used to create a 16-byte image, if you enable binary mode on the file open window. Though this will only allow you to use ASCII codes to create the header (rather than hexadecimal digits), you can hold down the ALT key while typing a base-10 number to access most 8-bit ASCII codes. information on how the 16-byte FDS header works can be found at nesdev.parodius.com (look for the "Famicom Disk System" doc by Nori, translated by Ki, under the "1.2. FDS Format" section). "



I actually tried overwriting a Doki Doki Panic image, but It didn't seem to work...actually, the file was corrupted (err 22 when loading it to the Ram Adapter), but it did seem to dump something...

I noticed Brad mentioned to hit F2 on exiting, but I think the docs say to hit F4...that's probably what he meant but I will ask him.

-Rob