Floppy emulator

[motorollin]

Wow, that sounds like a great project! Using FAT is not bad thing, it means the card can be put in a PC for easy transfer of files. I assume the device connects to a standard Amiga floppy connector? And how fast is access to the disk images? And would it be possible to allow access to the files on the flash card like a hard drive as well as mounting it as a virtual floppy, for transferring files that are not in an ADF?

--
moto

[motorollin]

You're a clever guy  :-) Any idea when it will be finished?

--
moto

[motorollin]

Put me down for two :-)

--
moto

[motorollin]

I LOVE your avatar :-)

--
moto

[motorollin]

That's fantastic - well done! :-) What is the IDC header for on the board? Is it for connecting to the internal floppy connnector to use it as DF0?

--
moto

[motorollin]

So does it work as a total DF0 replacement?

--
moto

[motorollin]

Read only huh, well that will make it a lot easier to transfer files from my Mac, which doesn't have a floppy drive. That means I have to copy files to DOS disks at work :roll:

If I could use an ADF explorer on the Mac, then copy the ADF file to the MMC card, and then mount the ADF as PC0 then all my problems would be solved :-D


So when can I buy one?

--
moto

[motorollin]

tnt23 wrote:

Read only huh, well that will make it a lot easier to transfer files from my Mac, which doesn't have a floppy drive. That means I have to copy files to DOS disks at work :roll:

If I could use an ADF explorer on the Mac, then copy the ADF file to the MMC card, and then mount the ADF as PC0 then all my problems would be solved :-D

Still seems a bit complicated to me. You don't have to take your files back from Amiga to Mac do you?

No I don't need to transfer back to the Mac. And I do have my A1200 networked to the Mac. It would only be in cases of emergency when I needed to use floppies (real or emulated :-) )

So when can I buy one?

After I fix most of the bugs and figure out a way of producing and delivering the device in small quantities I guess. What would you suggest the price can be?[/quote]
Well, that depends on how much it costs to manufacture :-)

--
moto

[motorollin]

monami wrote:
i am probably ignorant but anyway why can't a floppy emulator be done in software? wouldn't that be an easier job?  :roll:

Because software which is hard-coded to load from trackdisk.device unit 0 (DF0) would fail to load if it is booted from some software emulated floppy drive. The bootloader would fail when it tried to load data from the drive. As has already been pointed out, WHDLoad gets around this by patching the software. Alternatively, hardware projects like this replace the drive physically connected to the internal floppy connector and emulate the drive itself, so any software which directly access the drive will behave in exactly the same way as it would with a real disk.

--
moto

[motorollin]

monami wrote:
uae on amiga did floppy emulation so can anyone take advantage of that code?

How would a game which switches off the Amiga OS and halts all other code and in all other ways takes over the machine, and is also hard coded to read data from DF0, know anything about some kind of software floppy drive unless it is modified to do so? The only reason this works in UAE is because UAE is an emulator. A piece of software running inside UAE, e.g. a game, makes a call to what it thinks is hardware, but is actually more software which can do whatever it wants, and in this case that means feeding data to the game from a file instead of a disk. The same game running on actual Amiga hardware does not have the luxury of this flexibility unless you patch the software, which is what WHDLoad does, or replace parts of the hardware - which is what this project is for.

[EDIT]
Changed some of the instances of the word "software" to make that less confusing :-)
[/EDIT]

--
moto