Disk Details

FIVEC

After an image has been loaded, several other items may appear under the Details listbox, depending on what was detected. For example, this disk has some emulation data in the form of special read entries:



Whenver a disk is loaded, the details of the file format in general are selectable. Selecting this item and pressing "Details" brings up an overview of the particular format:



Besides details on disk irregularities (different sector sizes, missing sectors, etc) where applicable and detectable, FIVEC will offer some details on both the OS and the File system:



In this case, it has detected the N88 Stand-alone Disk BASIC boot sector, and the associated FAT8. N88 Stand-alone Disk BASIC was a platform for porting PC-88 programs to the newer PC-9801, and consisted of a disk that loaded the BASIC into memory, and then executed a specific starting command, generally the start-up code for whatever game was to be played.



I have added support for file extraction from FAT8 disks, although "FAT8" was never really a standard, so it's more accurate to say, FAT8 as implemented by N88 Stand-alone Disk BASIC. The FAT8 from that BASIC does not support directories, and the filename allowed is 6 characters and a three character extension. FAT8 did not impose any rules on valid filename characters, so it's quite possible for FAT8 filenames to violate the modern naming conventions. FIVEC will attempt to rename the files something valid when this occurs.

Pressing "Export Files" on this screen exports all files from the FAT to a specified folder from the dialogue. If enabled under the Configuration settings, it can also output any deleted files still present on the FAT, although there's no guarantee the actual contents of the file have not been overwritten.

The actual geometry of the FAT tables and clustering varies significantly by disk, and although all disk types that should have been historically available for this are supported, it has only been possible to test a fraction of examples for veracity.



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