Pre-made image that can be "flashed" on a floppy on Windows?

[theshinyknight]

I have no linux machine with a floppy, so I cannot do the dd step of the img posted here. Is there a pre-made image that I can just put on a floppy, using something like balena etcher or similar tools, on Windows?

I could use a VM with a usb floppy drive but windows is quite picky about how floppy drive works even under emulation, and I have no old machine that can run linux and has a USB floppy; so I was wondering if there is another way to put the image on a real floppy without use linux?

[davidgiven]

Any of these floppy writer tools should work with the .img files. The traditional one on Windows and DOS is rawrite.exe.

[theshinyknight]

Thanks; it would be great to have this info in the readme; I saw that the instructions are mentioning to use dd; so I was not sure if the image file posted here would work with something like rawrite.

BTW what do you use to write more files on the floppy? the FS is not visible on Windows (and can't try on linux for the same reason for which I explained before). Do you need a sort of CPM emulator like Virtualbox? Or did you connect the NC200 via serial port and copied the files from your computer to the disk via serial?

[davidgiven]

I used cpmtools to manipulate the file system images before writing them to floppy. The serial port's not supported yet, unfortunately (CP/M's serial API is kinda dismal). You can get cpmtools for Windows but it's likely to be pretty painful to use.

One of my other projects, FluxEngine, does actually have a basic CP/M file manager GUI which will let you read disk images but it's read only --- I will add read/write support at some point...

[theshinyknight]

I see; so you were working on an image and not directly on the floppy? Curious to know how did you add more files as in the video where you write code in different languages. the cpmtools I found for linux seems to work on images, so technically your img file can be manipulated with it, if I understand correctly.

Having the serial port working would be great; otherwise I don't see how files can be moved from CPMish and other OS. I will check FluxEngine, hoping that the r/w support will be added at one point.