ADFS Formatted Hard Drive Disk Images

The BBCHDDs package contains twenty-two preformatted ADFS hard drives for use with emulators.

The hard drive images are provided in the following sizes: 2Mb, 4Mb, 8Mb, 16Mb, 20Mb, 24Mb, 32Mb, 40Mb, 48Mb, 56Mb, 64Mb, 80Mb, 96Mb, 100Mb, 128Mb, 192Mb, 200Mb, 256Mb, 300Mb, 320Mb, 400Mb and 512Mb. In total this packages contain 2.83Gb (2898Mb) of data compressed to less than 15k.

One feature lacking from many BBC Microcomputer emulators is 1Mhz bus support, this unfortunately means that while floppy disk images and audio tape images are usually supported hard drives images are not.

These downloads will be useful for anyone who is using a emulator that supports hard drive (via 1Mhz bus) emulation or adding support for an existing emulator. The disk images can be mounted as ADFS L floppy disks but only the first 640Kb will be accessible. This is due to the way that ADFS is written.

I hope that the availability of ADFS formatted hard drive images here might encourage emulator authors and maintainers to implement the necessary code to support their use. As such, these packages may be of most interest to emulator developers.

The BBCHDDs RAR archive contains all the available hard drive images as individual RAR archives which will need to be decompressed for use. This was the most efficient way of arranging this release. 2.83 gigabytes of data compressed into a 10 kilobyte file is not bad, the compression ratio is approximately 296755:1.

The BBCHDDs self extracting release contains all the available hard drive images as individual self extracting archives which can be decompressed without the need for any external software.

The RAR archive is compressed for version 2.9 or later of unrar dearchiver and the ZIP archive can be extracted with version 2.0 or later of PKUnzip or equivalent.

Please Note: Most Anti-Virus software will take an exceptionally long time to scan the BBC Hard Drives package.