Index of /atarilibrary/atari_cd04/B_SYSTEM/PS0_MINT

 Name                    Last modified       Size  Description

 Parent Directory        11-May-2007 21:05      -  
 ATARIERR.H              16-Oct-1991 18:54     2k  
 FILESYS.H               15-Dec-1991 15:26    12k  
 MAKEFILE                08-Mar-1992 06:26     1k  
 PS0.C                   08-Mar-1992 06:23     8k  
 PS0.TOS                 08-Mar-1992 06:24     4k  

ps0 - a simple raw floppy device driver
Written by Dave Gymer and placed in the public domain.

Basically, what this program does is to install a character special
device called /dev/ps0 (the name is adjustable) which can be manipulated
almost like a normal file, but whose contents reflect the contents of the
floppy disk in drive A: (also adjustable).

There are a few things you can't do with /dev/ps0 that you can with a real
file:
	- delete it (well, you can, but then the device driver is lost and
	must be reloaded)
	- alter it's length (this is fixed at the length of the disk; attempts
	to seek further will silently fail)
	- stat it (again, you can, but you don't get anything useful out)

By default, it read double sided, 9 sector/track, 80 track disks in drive A:,
but you can alter all these things in the source and recompile.

I wrote this program after buying a 386 PC to run Linux on; the easiest way
to transfer files is via /dev/ps0 on the PC, but there was no MiNT equivalent.
At first I used a program called STraw (ST rawrite) which I knocked up in a
night, but I stupidly went and deleted the source, so I wrote this instead.
Good, huh?

You should add a line to your mint.cnf file to install it, along the lines of
	exec c:\mintboot\ps0.tos

Quick hint: if you use the GNU fileutils under MiNT, do _not_ use cp to
write files to /dev/ps0, cos it does them a byte at a time! Instead, use
`cat file >/dev/ps0'. Maybe one day Eric Smith will add proper block-special
devices to MiNT. But what do I care? :-) I run Eunuchs! 8^}

-- Dave Gymer
dpg@Cs.Nott.AC.UK