Reading SVI-328 floppies on PC?

Maybe you should check often every local (and near (even little) towns too) Kierrätyskeskus. (finnish term, a place where you can bring your old stuff, no matter is it electric stuff, furniture or clothes or toys, they will repair it and sell them with very low price.) If you have any luck, they could have separate 5,25" PC disk drive (and maybe it´s cables too). Or put "will pick up/buy cheap 1980s PC with 5,25" disk drive" to local shops´ notice boards. Surely someone has 5,25" PC in the closet or attic.

Another idea could be to make conversion program which allows MSX to read SVI BASIC programs. (if you used only BASIC?) Mikrobitti´s "Huvia & Hyötyä MSX" book had that program, don´t remember thought was it tape only or did it read disk programs too?

So an ordinary PC floppy drive will read the disks just fine? That's nice, I know a guy who kinda collects old computer stuff and he has a fully functional computer with a floppy drive.

If you have the possibility to use MS-DOS, I recommend ImageDisk which gives you more detailed information and it also analysis the disk format.
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/

The first track on the first side is formatted with FM (18 sectors, 128 bytes) and the rest with MFM (17 sectors, 256 bytes). That applies to both single (SVI-902/605A) and double sided drives (SVI-605B). There were also an 80 track single sided drive available, SVI-912, but that was not a popular drive.

There's usually no problem reading the FM track in a PC, writing depends on your floppy controller chip, you can always skip that track because the first 3 are normally system tracks.

Start up IMD and configure the drive, the program detects the format for each track but to help it by settings would be:

- Cylinders 40
- Sides 2 for the SVI-605B, otherwise 1
- Double-step On for a HD drive, otherwise Off

For reading/writing problems with the first track (FM formatted), choose eXclusion map and toggle track 0 for first side only (down arrow symbol).

There's also a couple tools for converting the special disk image type to a format with sector data only. For example:

IMDU filein.IMD fileout.DSK /B

BIN2IMD filein.DSK fileout.IMD 328SS.B2I
BIN2IMD filein.DSK fileout.IMD 328DS.B2I /2

Here are the two option files used in the last conversion.

;
; Filename: 328SS.B2I
;
; Specravideo SVI-328 5.25" 40 track SS DD option file
; Usage: BIN2IMD filein.DSK fileout.IMD 328SS.B2I
;
0 N=40 DM=2 SS=128 SM=1-18 /1
1 DM=5 SS=256 SM=1-17 /1

;
; Filename: 328DS.B2I
;
; Specravideo SVI-328 5.25" 40 track DS DD option file
; Usage: BIN2IMD filein.DSK fileout.IMD 328DS.B2I /2
;
0 N=40 DM0=2 SS0=128 SM0=1-18 DM1=5 SS1=256 SM1=1-17
1 DM=5 SS=256 SM=1-17