[sebhc] H17 ROM and disk info

[Steven Parker]

>Question: Does any H8 software ever do anything "funny" with these values?

HDOS doesn't.  I'm not entirely sure what other parties may have done with 
them.

>...would it be worthwhile to include the header in the
>disk data file, or do you think it would be OK to just swallow it on writes
>and regenerate it on reads.

Theoretically, another OS could have an entirely different format on all 
tracks other than track zero, but so far, I'm not aware of anything that 
can't be reconstructed from the data using the format already described.  So 
at this point I don't see that the added complexity in storage format (and 
emulator coding) for strictly generic emulation is justified.

I'm not even sure how to be purely generic about it anyway, since an OS (or 
a custom driver) could change stuff like the number of sectors, the 
size/format/presence of sector headers, the relationship between sectors and 
holes, or even disregard holes entirely.

>Because I have no specs for the interface, so I have to figure it out by 
>what
>the software is doing. That will be much easier if I can have an idea what 
>the
>values the codes is loading/storing contain.

I wasn't expecting that you'd need to spend any time with the 
parameter-driven driver to figure out how to handle emulation.  I think the 
low-level functions (that it calls anyway) should show you everything 
important.  I was thinking the trickiest part of the emulation would be 
satisfying the timing expectations in the driver (time between holes, holes 
and data, etc).

Cheers,

- Steven

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