USAGE of vf88man utilities version 2.1

vf88man are utilities to manage D88 images for the Epson PX-8 and PX-4 emulator
made by Toshiya TAKEDA (http://homepage3.nifty.com/takeda-toshiya/).

The emulator allows reading and writing images from the emulator itself, but
not from and to the file system. These utilities make this possible. Extra
features are creating empty D88 images and erasing files from images. There is
also a conversion tool to convert vfd images (used by vfloppy) to D88 images.

Below the usage of the tools, but the definitive documentation is the c-source.

Generic but optional argument for all tools:
-d N    - with N a number between 1 and 4. This enables the debug printouts,
          which are graded into function level. Mainly created for debugging
          while writing, it might be useful or amusing for end users.

vformat - vformat <imageName>
          This utility creates a empty image file. The only argument is the
          file name. An existing file will not be overwritten. This program
          version is independent from the d88header.bin, which was needed by
          the 2.0 version of vformat.

vfread  - vfread <imageName> [<fileName>}
          This utility has two modes; with one argument, this is interpreted
          as an image name and a primitive directory is printed. Technically
          the relevant information of each used directory extend is printed, so
          files larger than 32 kByte will appear multiple times.
          With two arguments, the second is interpreted as a filename which
          should be read from the image (first argument). This filename is
          restricted to the 8.3 format and may have no path information, or it
          will be mangled, and the file will not be found. The created
          filename will appear as typed in (at least with case sensitive file
          systems).

vfwrite - vfwrite <imageName> <fileName>
          This utility will attempt to add a file to the image. Checks are made
          on availability of free blocks and extends in the image (even
          compensating for an extisting copy of the file in the image, which
          will be overwritten). The file name is restricted to the 8.3 format or
          the name in the image will be mangled.

vferase - vferase <imageName> <fileName>
          By special request this utility was created to erase files from an
          image. The fileName is case insensitive, but is restricted to 8.3
          format.

vfd2d88 - vfd2d88 <vfdImageName> <d88ImageName>
          This utility converts a vfd format image to a d88 image. Ther are
          probably not many of those outside my computer, but it was easy to
          make and useful to me. The vfd format is used by the 1.x and 2.0
          interim release of epspd TF-20 emulator, which allows connecting a
          Linux machine to a real PX-4 or PX-8. 

fjkraan, 2010-04-02
