Utility for adding files to Lisa disk images

[fri0701]

Hi everyone,
I wanted to share some code from a project I've been working on recently.

Now that we have the actual Lisa source code to reference, I thought it would be a worthy challenge to try and write a utility program to programmatically add files onto a Lisa disk image. It took about a month of fiddling with code and combing through the Lisa source for me to understand all the moving parts, but I finally have a version that (mostly) works! (I also wrote the corresponding read code, which will extract all files from a given disk).

Code is here, under "srcBuilder". The README will explain more about how to set things up: https://github.com/tfrikker/lisa_utils

(Right now I only support 5MB images in B-tree FS format, but perhaps more will come later. I also still have a significant bug that shows up sometimes when writing the catalog entries; sometimes adding files makes others disappear)

I wrote this in the hopes that I could compile at least *something* from the Lisa source release in Lisa Pascal Workshop (and, spoiler alert, I was - the "STUNTS" hardware demo. See attached image). After fixing some of the above issues, it'd be really great to ingest many more files and see if we can get a full app built.

I hope someone here finds this useful (or at least technically interesting!). I learned a lot from this project, and I hope to contribute some code to lisafshtool soon as well.

Questions, comments, or PRs would be much appreciated 

[bmwcyclist]

Thanks for your hard work!

[AlexTheCat123]

Thanks, this is awesome! I wish I had something like this when I started compiling all the source code a couple months ago. I decided that it would be quicker to transfer the files to the Lisa via serial instead of taking the time to write a filesystem tool (not sure if I was right about that or not), but the serial transfers obviously ended up being really painful for the full 20-something MB of code.

[TorZidan]

... and I hope to contribute some code to lisafshtool soon as well.

Nice! Yes, ideally, this should be merged into lisafsh-tool at  https://github.com/arcanebyte/lisaem/blob/master/src/tools/src/lisafsh-tool.c .
I had a similar idea and studied the lisafsh-tool code, and I realized that the code needs a complete rewrite and documenting before it can be enhanced.
So I rewrote it, but did not have a chance to submit it through a pull request . Perhaps I should do that...