The Sinclair QL with any of the floppy interfaces tried so far (Sandy Q-Board, Miracle Systems Trump Card and Super Gold Card) will read and write IMG files without the need for an IMG.CFG file. The settings in the FF.CFG need to be set to the following otherwise formatting will not work and HD disks won't work on the Super Gold Card (even if FLP_DENSITY is used to manually set the disk type):
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interface = shugart
host = unspecified
pin02 = dens
pin34 = rdy
It should be noted that all interfaces which use the default Q-Jump Toolkit II version of the FORMAT command fail to determine the correct number of sides on in a floppy image and hence format single sided, giving 720 sectors rather than the expected 1440. However, if a pre-formatted image generated by dumping a real floppy or from an emulator is used then everything works. It's only the FORMAT command which is broken. (The reason for this is being investigated.)
The version of FORMAT on the Miracle Systems Gold Card and Super Gold Card use a different algorithm and work correctly.
It is unknown if the FORMAT command in SMSQ/e running on a Super Gold Card works or not.
To create an empty DSDD image using the following command under UNIX/Linux:
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dd if=/dev/zero of=myfloppy.img bs=512 count=1440
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dd if=/dev/zero of=myhdfloppy.img bs=512 count=2880