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Tool for automatic creation of FAT-formatted floppy disk images

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Flopgen

Flopgen is a tool for automatic creation of FAT-formatted floppy disk images with user-supplied files.

This program should be especially useful for people who need to transfer files frequently between their main machines and emulated/virtualised legacy systems with no or unreliable CD support (e.g. DOS and old versions of Windows).

Supported functions

  • Creating FAT12-formatted .img floppy disk images in a raw format with capacity either 360, 720, 1200, 1440 or 2880 KB
  • Making as many images as required automatically if supplied files do not fit in one disk
  • Organising provided files so that the largest ones are put in a floppy disk image first
  • Reading the list of files to be added to images from either the command line, the standard input or a text file
  • Processing both files and directories supplied by the user (directories are always processed recursively)

Installation

Pre-built binaries (ready to use, recommended)

You can download pre-built binaries from the releases page.

From source code

  1. Make sure that a compiler supporting the C++17 standard is installed on your machine.
  2. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/maksgraczyk/Flopgen.
  3. Navigate to the directory where you have cloned the repository and run make.
  4. Done! You can run Flopgen by executing e.g. ./flopgen on Linux/Unix.

How to use

For the first use, running flopgen --help is recommended. This will display a help message explaining how to use the program along with all available flags and options.

Apart from running help, you must always specify the -o/--output option when using Flopgen. This option tells the program how to name resultant floppy disk images (there might be more than one image produced). For example, executing Flopgen with -o test will produce images of form test1.img, test2.img, test3.img etc.

By default, Flopgen creates FAT12-formatted 1440 KB floppy disk images using code page 437. Long file name support is always enabled.

If a directory or a file takes too much disk space (i.e. takes more disk space than the specified floppy disk capacity), Flopgen will not add it to any image. A directory is counted as one inseparable element. Please note that the disk space occupied by a file is not necessarily the same as the size of the file due to how FAT is structured.

When Flopgen runs successfully, you will see Successfully created X floppy disk images., where X is the number of resultant images. These are produced in the same directory Flopgen is run in (because of that, do not run the program with -o set to some path like test/disk, this will not work).

Examples

Making a 1440 KB floppy disk image with files test1.dat, test2.dat and test3.dat

flopgen -o (name) test1.dat test2.dat test3.dat

Making a 720 KB floppy disk image with directory Floppy

flopgen -o (name) -s 720 Floppy

Making a 1440 KB floppy disk image with files listed by the standard input

Filenames must be separated by a new line in the list.

flopgen -o (name) -i -

Making a 2880 KB floppy disk image with files provided by an external list called list.txt

Filenames must be separated by a new line in the list.

flopgen -o (name) -s 2880 -i list.txt

Making a 1440 KB floppy disk image with directory Disk and using code page 852

flopgen -o (name) -c 852 Disk

Making a 1440 KB floppy disk image with all files from directory Folder (Linux/Unix)

The command is Linux/Unix-specific. In this case, the resultant images will contain all files stored inside directory Folder, but without the directory entry Folder itself.

flopgen -o (name) Folder/*

Found a bug?

If so, don't hesitate to report it in the issues page.

Want to contribute?

Great! All contributions are welcome.

Third-party code used

  • FatFs: Flopgen uses FatFs created by ChaN and partially modified by myself. Its code is stored in the fatfs directory and is licensed under the terms outlined in fatfs/LICENSE.txt. The exception is fatfs/fattime.c which is a file written by myself and released under the 2-clause BSD license.
  • CLI11: Flopgen uses CLI11 for command line input parsing. Its code is stored in the cli directory and is licensed under the terms outlined in cli/LICENSE.

License

Apart from the third-party code indicated in the previous section and fatfs/fattime.c, the project is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (see LICENSE). If in doubt, check the starting comment of a source file for licensing information applicable to the file.

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Tool for automatic creation of FAT-formatted floppy disk images

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