Adding more functionality to my USB -> IR RP2040 firmware to support Apricot wired mice as well, I was able to explore Apricot Activity on the Apricot PC!  

https://forgejo.crashtest.dev/jasonalexander-ja/apridapter

#aprilcot #apricot #apricotpc #actapricot #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

That was a lot of work nothing; but in my defence, I, nor clearly anyone else in the Apricot community could not find ANY prior reference to LibDsk or dskconv in reference to Apricot/Apridisk on the internet apart from on the LibDsk website

https://www.seasip.info/Unix/LibDsk/

The source tree for LibDsk also contained a HTML file describing the Apridisk format, it turns it's just RAW, but every sector has a header, and there can be comment records, and some sectors can be RLE encoded, that makes converting them actually pretty easy

Using that as a reference, I was able to add support for Apridisk file formats directly into the Greaseweazle CLI client, meaning, you can now directly write out Apridisk formatted files (and thus, all on actapricot.org archive) using Greaseweazle using the flag `--format=apricot.single` or `apricot.double`

https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/pull/626

A far cry from spinning up a whole other DOS PC that was the Internet's generally accepted method previously  

And ofc, my Apricot PC is booting off of both drives without issue, and I got DR's GSX working which meant I was able to load Apricot's very own Activity GUI shell!

Now, I just need a mouse...

#aprilcot #apricot #apricotpc #actapricot #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing