pymmbtool 1.0.0

Command line tools to manage BBC Microcomputer DFS disk images and MMB disk bundles

Table of Contents

• Overview

• History

• Details

• Requirements

• Installation

• Uninstall

• Instructions

• Contributing

• Sponsoring

• Credits

• Changelog

  • 1.0.0

  • 0.7.1

  • 0.7

  • 0.1

Overview

PyMMBtool is a collection of command line tools to allow access to BBC Microcomputer DFS disc images, and MMB image bundles.

History

The BBC Microcomputer has been around for many years (over 30 years now), and in all that time it has supported Tape, Floppy Disk, and occasionally small Hard Disk Drive storage (If you have a 1770 and ADFS) but thanks to the work of a number of enthusiasts there is now an inexpensive add-on to allow any BBC Microcomputer (even those without Floppy Disk hardware) to access mass storage on MMC Flash Cards.

This is wonderful but then poses a further problem, how to get the disk images that the MMC/SuperMMC/TurboMMC hardware supports onto the flash card?

There are some tools which have been used for several years, they work ok, as long as you are running a supported version of Windows (They don’t work, for example, under Wine or CrossoverOffice), but I’ve found them a little confusing. The process to create an MMB, add a new disk and put files on it is well documented but requires several steps and provides ample opportunity for mistakes.

Details

This is where PyMMB is intended to fit in. The aim of the project is to provide a platform independant library, command-line toolset, GUI application and FUSE binding for managing files stored on DFS disks, contained within MMB files.

This package is the command line tools which provide access to the key functions of the PyMMB library.

Requirements

• PyMMB - The library (part of the PyMMB project) which supports all all MMB and DFS access functionality

This package is written for Python 2.x (at least 2.5) and currently is not supported under Python 3.x

Installation

You can install PyMMBtool with your favourite egg installer. We recommend using pip

pip install PyMMBtool

Uninstall

If you are using pip you can uninstall using

pip uninstall PyMMBtool

Instructions

Documentation is available on the project’s git repo at https://projects.limbicly.com/bbc-micro/PyMMB/PyMMBtool/doc/

Contributing

Contributions of code, development time, testing, or money are welcome. If you are kind enough to donate money, your name (and optionally company name, and email or web address) will be listed as a sponsor.

You can join the project, see the current auto-build status, download the code or browse the repository at https://projects.limbicly.com/bbc-micro/PyMMB/PyMMBtool/

Please consider joining the PyMMB project before you fork. While you are welcome to do either, joining us will help propell PyMMB forwards faster the larger the contributor base becomes.

Sponsoring

Development of this project is being sponsored by the following generous individuals or organisations :

• Top Level Software Products Unlimited

• Limbic Cloud Solutions

Credits

• Acorn Computers - For producing probably the most innovative computer for its time ever.

• Martin Mather - For developing the original MMC Flash Card interface (and the MMB file format which bears his initials) for the BBC Micro.

• Steve O’Leary - The code for FS Manager which helped me understand both MMB and DFS formats better.

Changelog

1.0.0

• First production release

• Planned features implemented

• CI/CD build and deployment

• Documentation updated

0.7.1

• Documentation updates

0.7

• First beta release

• New build/release system (Gitlab CI based)

0.1

• First alpha release