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| Posted on 7/27/05 at 01:36 PM | |
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I read all the problems ED and others are having re Melco. I found out that the Melco disk can only be formatted with a controller that can do SINGLE SIDED S.Density formatting. There were in the old days disk controllers with: The GOLDSTAR chip AND the PRIME 2 chip. Both these controllers did the job. When higher speed and integrated motherboards came in the disk controller was imbedded in the motherboard. You could of course get one of the Goldstar/Prime2 chipset controllers and disable the motherboard disk Controller… OR you could hunt for motherboards that will work. You do not have to go back to 486 oldies to find one either, I have a Pentium 450 that can format Melco. BUT all this gave you was Melco .exp format stuff. And as we all know by now, if you switched the machine off and forgot the disk in the drive, Goodbye disk data!! True Sizer will NOT DO IT, But it can be used to test for compatibility. In short NO program can Format a compatible disk IF the DISK CONTROLLER does not have that Format capability! IF you use the Tape input to feed the data into the machine you could: Hit “READ”,“TAPE”: READ TAJIMA "NEXT" button : READ BARUDAN I set about designing the Masis Interface. Two days later, by coming in at the tape input you could use .DST and .DAT files, and bingo! You had a Tajima or Barudan lookalike with a Tajima Head. If you were lucky enough to get the correct disk controller, then there is a program in the Masis ECS 3.23 Software which drives the interface to convert the .EXP to a genuine .DST with all sizes imbedded. You can then send that to the machine as .DST ED, Please contact me re pricing see if I can help, before you sell the boat!! Regards, Mike | ||
 
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