pcjs/configs/pc/disks/README.md

IBM PC Disk Sets

An assortment of IBM PC Disk Sets, for use by IBM PC Machine Configurations.

Example

An FDC (Floppy Disk Controller) XML file, such as samples.xml, typically contains <disk> entries like:

<disk path="/disks/pc/dos/ibm/1.00/PCDOS100.json">PC-DOS 1.0</disk>
<disk path="/disks/pc/dos/ibm/1.10/PCDOS110.json">PC-DOS 1.1</disk>
<disk path="/disks/pc/dos/ibm/2.00/PCDOS200-DISK1.json">PC-DOS 2.0 (Disk 1)</disk>
<disk path="/disks/pc/dos/ibm/2.00/PCDOS200-DISK2.json">PC-DOS 2.0 (Disk 2)</disk>
<disk path="/disks/pc/games/microsoft/adventure/adventure-1981.json">Microsoft Adventure</disk>
<disk path="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/disk.json" href="http://www.bricklin.com/history/vclicense.htm" desc="VisiCalc License">VisiCalc</disk>

However, if you wanted to load VisiCalc directly from the /apps folder, rather than using a pre-generated disk image, you could do that with an <manifest> entry that references the application's manifest.xml:

<manifest ref="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/manifest.xml" disk="disk"/>

The application must have a manifest.xml with <disk> section containing an id value that matches the disk value specified above:

<disk id="disk" dir="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/">
    <file>VC.COM</file>
    <file dir="../">README.md</file>
    <link href="http://www.bricklin.com/history/vclicense.htm">VisiCalc License</link>
</disk>

If multiple disks are defined in the manifest, and you want to include them all, you can set the disk value to '*', as in:

<manifest ref="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/manifest.xml" disk="*"/>

As an added bonus, PCjs will automatically display the descriptive <link> whenever this item is selected, and it will dynamically generate a disk image containing all the specified <file> entries when the selected item is loaded.

Pre-generated images are still preferred, and you can now include those in the application manifest.xml as well, by adding an href value to the <disk> section that was used to create the image:

<disk id="disk" dir="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/" href="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/disk.json">
    <file>VC.COM</file>
    <file dir="../">README.md</file>
    <link href="http://www.bricklin.com/history/vclicense.htm">VisiCalc License</link>
</disk>

The PCjs "diskdump" module is used to create all our pre-generated JSON-encoded disk images. In the above example, a pre-generated disk image could be created from the command-line with either the "--dir" option (which will traverse all subdirectories as well):

node diskdump --dir=./apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/ --format=json --output=./apps/pc/1981/visicalc/disk.json

or with the "--path" option, which specifies either a single file or a set files separated by semi-colons:

node diskdump "--path=./apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/vc.com;../readme.md" --format=json --output=./apps/pc/1981/visicalc/disk.json

or via the PCjs server's "diskdump" API:

http://www.pcjs.org/api/v1/dump?path=/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/vc.com&format=json