TeleDisk Archives

[Dave Frederickson]

I get most of the software for my 85B from the HP Computer Museum's archives. There's an issue in that some of the discs imaged with TeleDisk on non-blank media. Consequently some of the images contain bogus data like data on side 1 of a single-sided disc or extra tracks.
With the recent acquisition of a Greaseweazle it seems that I have the opportunity to cleanup some of these images.
The question is what's the best format?
1. A linear sector dump, like the images provided with the HP-85 emulator, which produces images 264k in length for a 3.5" SS/DD disc. Convenient for emulator users.
2. A flux image produced with Greaseweazle. This image contains info like sector interleave - crucial for exact reproduction of vintage discs.
3. An intermediate format like TeleDisk or IMD which retain some low-level info. There are two issues with this format. First, TeleDisk requires vintage hardware and IMD can't handle tracks with differing sector sizes. Apparently many of the 3.5" SS/DD discs from HP contain an extra 17th sector of 128 bytes to be used for media wear data. LIF images with 17-sector tracks are 280k in size.
It has been suggested to provide all three formats.
https://groups.io/g/VintHPcom/message/10731

Both VP at HP Series 80 and Dave Collins the HP Computer Museum have already offered to host the updated files.

-Dave