What Floppy Format? What Floppy Format? Copyright (c) 1992 by Angel Babudro "Organic Computer Wizardry" 8 Taylor Avenue * Clinton, NY USA 13323-1406 (315) 853-1070 This programme is hereby donated to the public domain as a copyright work ("Freeware"). The software is provided "AS IS" -- NO WARRANTIES are expressed or implied. Use at your own risk! I don't want any money for WFF; it's my contribution back to all the fine programmers who have donated their labour in the form of public domain software. Please distribute complete copies of WFF to bulletin boards and friends -- please shackle any temptations you might have to eliminate a file or two -- not nice. :) As a copyright work, you may not sell WFF. If you are a consultant or somehow WFF helps you to make money, I think it may be appropriate to send me a little something -- maybe even some of your own software? -- I'll let you decide what is fair in your situation. Now that I've made that clear, let me tell you what it is that I've created! What Floppy Format? (WFF) is an easy-to-use, menu-driven programme to set defaults and select floppy disk densities for use with FDFORMAT, a formatting utility written and donated to the public domain by Christophe Hochst tter (normally found as FDFRM16A.ZIP or FDFORM18.ZIP on BBS's). I made this utility because I realized how many different options there were just to format a disk, depending on whether I was doing a 3«", 5¬", or 8" floppy and whether I wanted sector sliding, etc. So to make my life simpler I created WFF to allow a person to set their preferred method of formatting once, then just choose the drive and density wanted and WFF takes care of issuing the command line parameters. The extra high-density and off-colour formats provided via FDFORMAT are wonderful. FDFORMAT packs 1.48Mb on a 5¬-inch disk and up to 1.72Mb on a 3«-inch disk! And I've noticed that on my computer (using a CompatiCard IV) I don't even need the less-than-1k TSR to read/write/format the disks. It's the best disk capacity extender I've seen, and it's public domain, too! Can't beat it. If you can't find it on your local BBS, FDFORMAT can be downloaded from Nite-Air BBS on the East Coast at (315) 339-8831 (USR HST 14.4). On the West Coast, try the Researcher's BBS at (805) 949- 8151 (USR HST 1440). You can send messages to me as "Angelo Babudro" on either BBS. As of this writing the most recent version I've seen is version 1.8 contained in the file FDFORM18.ARJ or FDFORM18.ZIP. WARNING WFF allows you to format disks in drive letters WARNING _______ other than A: or B: by assigning drive A: to that 1 drive. I did this so that I could format my 8" drive (which is K: on my system) using FDFORMAT. To illustrate, my 8" drive is K: so WFF does an "ASSIGN a=k" before issuing the FDFORMAT command. When FDFORMAT is finished, an "ASSIGN" command is issued by itself to remove the drive assignment. BEWARE If you set a hard disk letter as a floppy disk BEWARE ______ drive I have no idea what will happen (I'm not going to try it!). So PLEASE PLEASE be careful if you use something other than drives A: and B: -- double check that it's a floppy disk letter you're using! File List _________ The files that make up What Floppy Format? are as follows: wff.exe The executable file wff.txt The documentation (this text) in ASCII format wff.wp The documentation (this text) in WordPerfect 5 format (so you can format for your printer) wff.new Late-breaking news order.frm Order form for all of my Shareware! :) If you distribute WFF to friends, bulletin boards, or whatever, please include all of these files. Using WFF _________ NOTE: WFF.EXE should reside in a directory in your DOS PATH. Otherwise you will have to use "cd" to change to that directory each time. To set your path use the "set path=" command in your autoexec.bat file. Just type WFF from the DOS prompt. The first time you use it, WFF will pop-up its set-up screen for you to fill in. Basically, just tell it whether you want a monochrome or colour screen, which types of floppy disk drives you have (up to 4) and the drive letters, and the path to the FDFORMAT programme. If FDFORMAT resides in a directory which is in your DOS PATH it will automatically be filled in. (See WARNING above about floppy drives.) Default values for disk verification and sector sliding are also presented for you to change. If you aren't sure what you want to use, just leave the defaults as they are -- the default sector sliding values should improve the floppy disk's speed on any computer. See the documentation for FDFORMAT for details about these. After you've done the set-up, just pick the size of disk you want, shown horizontally -- 3«-inch, 5¬-inch, and 8-inch -- and press 2 RETURN. You'll see a vertical menu of the densities available, depending on whether you have double-density or high-density drives -- densities which are not valid for your drive(s) cannot be selected. Highlight your selection and press RETURN. That's all there is to it! One problem I can anticipate is if you have two of the same size floppy disk drives. I've designed WFF to allow selection of disk drives based on size rather than drive letter which means that it won't know which of two identical drives you want to use. In this case it will choose the last drive of the same type in the list (e.g., if you define drives A and B as 5.25" drives it will choose drive B). I would really like to hear from people who use WFF -- your comments, suggestions, thoughts, speculations, etc. If you would like the latest version of WFF along with samples of my other shareware products, please order my Sampler Disk (see ORDER.FRM). You can reach me thus: Mail Angel Babudro, 28 Mulberry Street, Clinton, NY 13323-1506 USA BBS Angelo Babudro East Coast Nite-Air BBS, Central NY (315) 339-8831 USR HST 14.4 Odie's PCBoard, Central NY (315) 339-6713 USR HST DS West Coast The Researcher's BBS, Southern CA (805) 949-8151 USR HST DS 3