This is a remaster of the Knoppix 7.2.0 CD Edition, done with the purpose of providing an operating system for those who want to use some of the utilities I wrote for the CoBra computer. Since these days most users seem to have migrated to 64-bit computers (I'm not one of them) I had to find a way to bridge the gap between them and these utilities. Because I wrote them for Linux (and the ones that are compiled are for Linux 32-bit), there have been some users who had trouble finding a way to use them. Knoppix is a 32-bit Linux distribution, and I'm very familiar with customizing and remastering Knoppix.
There are three ways to use this CD image: you can burn it to a DVD disc (since the size exceeds the standard size of a CD), you can transfer it on a flash drive and then boot from it, or you can use it in a virtual machine.
I built this CD ISO image with the idea of virtual computing in mind. The virtual machine is the most flexible and easy method, since the first two methods require a 32-bit physical computer to boot the CD. A virtual machine can be easily created regardless of what kind of computer you have, and regardless of the virtual computing software you use (personally I use the free Open Source VirtualBox software in Linux, which can also be used in Windows, but any other virtual computing software can be used if you wish - VMWare, Parallels, Hyper-V Manager, QEMU etc.).
In order to use this CD image in a virtual machine you just need to create an empty virtual machine (with NO HARDDISK needed) for a 32-bit Linux operating system. Give it about 256-512 MB RAM, 128 MB video memory and a CD drive and also make sure it has USB access. The easiest way to share files with this virtual machine is with a USB flash drive you insert in your host computer and then access from the virtual machine.
So, in order to process some files with the CoBra utilities on this CD, put those files on a USB flash drive, boot from the CD image in a virtual machine, then connect the USB flash drive to the virtual machine, copy the files to the Linux file system (create an empty directory somewhere in the home directory /home/knoppix) and then run the CoBra utilities on these files. Then copy the resulting files back to the flash drive and disconnect the flash drive from the virtual machine.
All these utilities are accessible from the Start Menu, in the CoBra submenu, and for the ones that are command-line utilities, a full syntax description is given when launched from the Start Menu.
This is a Bash script which takes a file name as argument. The file must contain a binary block of Spectrum code meant to be loaded in the Spectrum memory somewhere at a loading address NNNN (a 4-digit hex number). This file must be named FILENAME.hexdump.data.bin, where FILENAME is any max. 10-letter name you choose, but the rest of the file name must be exactly ".hexdump.data.bin".
USAGE: in a console window, type the following command:
bin2tap /path/to/FILENAME start=NNNN
/path/to/FILENAME.tap
This is a program with a graphical interface written in C++ and Qt (there are 2 different versions, one in Qt3 and one in Qt4) which can transfer files between the Linux filesystem and a RAW CoBra CP/M floppy image. A full help is included in the program and can be shown by pressing F1.
This is a program with a graphical interface written in C++ and Qt (there are 2 different versions, one in Qt3 and one in Qt4) which can transfer files between the Linux filesystem and a RAW CoBra DEVIL floppy image. A full help is included in the program and can be shown by pressing F1.
This is a command-line utility, written in C, which takes a file name (/path/to/filename) as argument. The contents of the file will be reversed and saved as a different file in the same directory (/path/to/filename-rev).
I wrote this utility in order to make it easier to disassemble CP/M code saved in reverse order in the system tracks of some CoBra bootable floppies.
This is a Bash script which takes a file name as argument, plus 2 more (optional) arguments - a start and an end track number. The file must contain a Teledisk floppy image and the start and end track numbers specify a range of tracks to be extracted from the Teledisk floppy image and saved in a RAW floppy image which can then be used with the "CoBra CPM Disk Image Tool" utility or in a floppy hardware emulator like HxC.
If the start track is not specified, the start track will default to 0 and the end track to 79. If the start track is specified but the end track is not specified, the end track will default to 79.