Floppy emulator

[tnt23]

motorollin wrote:
So does it work as a total DF0 replacement?

--
moto

As a read-only, ADF-based replacement :lol: Give me a couple of hours to fit the thing into my A500 and I'll report back :-)

[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

[Doobrey]

tnt23 wrote:

Another issue is the Nokia 3310's LCD. Popular and affordable and all, it is a challenge to build simple and eye appealing connector for it. (See JELU Web-Shop for more info)

Have you thought about using a Nokia colour LCD?
Display3000.com webshop sells them in a variety of configs, and a SMD connector for it too(no more soldering to the flexible PCB like you have to on the 3310). I've currently got one hooked up to the parallel port which shows MP3 album art.

[mrmkl]

tnt23 wrote:

"To be honest, I haven't spent much time thinking about writing. I was obsessed with reading in the first place you see  There are good chances another tight loop can be built to aquire writing flow and to somehow deal with it, not necessarily turning that into pure ADF."

Perhaps the Amiga could write ADF-images to the flash card, via somekind of serial protocol through the floppy port? It is not the same thing as writing to a floppy, but you could do things from the Amiga keyboard. And similarly since microcontrollers usually have UARTs, you could read and write floppy-images from a remote computer via RS-232.

"Loading one ADF sector from MMC now takes 13ms, and preparing one MFM sector takes 56ms. These times can be optimized in variety of ways, from code to hardware (going high megaherz, using SDRAM instead of EDO/FPM DRAM etc)"

May a job for an FPGA?

[tnt23]

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?

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?

[tnt23]

@Doobrey

Isn't the fifty bucks color LCD an overkill? I doubt there's much to show on it in my case :-)

[humppa]

@tnt23:

Sorry, little OT: Are you the "tnt" I know from the C64/MMC64-scene? If yes, glad to hear you're also working on Amiga-stuff now. I appreciate your work!

[Mikkel]

Are you going to publish source/schematics when the project is finished or is this going to be a commercial product?

Anders M.

[Hyperspeed]

Avoid Spaceballs - State of the Art, I remember that demo turning my floppy drive into a buzzsaw!

:-D

Looks great, I think it should be for DF0: internal and it would need to work well with the desktop casing (the eject button could be replaced with an access light).

Just out of curio, what is the maximum transfer rate of the floppy interface? The drives only do 10k/s and the flash cards 1MB/s!



EDIT: Oh, the F.Disk LED will be the access light right? We'll have to use putty for the eject button hole. ;-)

[tnt23]

@humppa

No, I have never been to the C64 scene [unfortunately] :-) I love the MMC64 project, too.

[tnt23]

mrmkl wrote:

Perhaps the Amiga could write ADF-images to the flash card, via somekind of serial protocol through the floppy port? It is not the same thing as writing to a floppy, but you could do things from the Amiga keyboard. And similarly since microcontrollers usually have UARTs, you could read and write floppy-images from a remote computer via RS-232.

Amiga also has RS-232 port, this could be used, too. Some software support from Amiga side would be necessary, like drivers.

UARTs are great, but there is USB. A guy from Amiga Floppy Project (http://techtravels.org/amiga/amigablog) interfaces his reader with computer via USB.

"Loading one ADF sector from MMC now takes 13ms, and preparing one MFM sector takes 56ms. These times can be optimized in variety of ways, from code to hardware (going high megaherz, using SDRAM instead of EDO/FPM DRAM etc)"

May a job for an FPGA?

Maybe. I will teach myself FPGA some day for sure, just look at the Minimig :-) It is that I'm having fun with Atmel AVR's now.

[tnt23]

Yesterday I've put the device into A500's drive bay and set it to DF0. Workbench 1.2, 1.3 and utilities like DOpus, AMOS Pro boot just great!

Bad news is that of six or seven games on my MMC only ARKANOID managed to load and run. Also, only two demos loaded and run OK, one is some 40K intro and ANNOUNCE.

Maybe this is due to the fact that AmigaDOS doesn't use INDEX pulse (says DiskMonTools manual), which is not implemented in my design, but can well be used by other software to sync to.

Hyperspeed wrote:
Avoid Spaceballs - State of the Art, I remember that demo turning my floppy drive into a buzzsaw!

:-D

State of the Art didn't run either. If I do a diskcopy from emulated DF1 to real floppy it runs just fine. There must be something important I miss about the floppy interface.

Looks great, I think it should be for DF0: internal and it would need to work well with the desktop casing (the eject button could be replaced with an access light).

Just out of curio, what is the maximum transfer rate of the floppy interface? The drives only do 10k/s and the flash cards 1MB/s!



EDIT: Oh, the F.Disk LED will be the access light right? We'll have to use putty for the eject button hole. ;-)

There is an LCD with all sorts of indications, like head movement, drive selection, side and dir signals :-)

Floppy speed test shows values around 21K-22K bytes per second. I don't know if the floppy DMA can be faster than 500K bits per second, or roughly 60Kbytes/s. We are trying to mimic the FDD as much as possible, so don't expect any breakthrough here :-)

[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

[Zac67]

Great to hear about your progress (there are always drawbacks, so keep going).

I think you should keep the 'use this device as a card reader, too' in mind while making changes to the hardware. It'd be a very good chance to attach the emulator in such a way that it can be used to access the flash card in a more efficient way (faster and higher capacity access).
Maybe through serial (probably slow), parallel (lot of hardware involved) or through the floppy port, just with a more efficient protocol - after all, you don't really need MFM for transport.
If you provide the means of accessing the flash card for real, someone else will probably write a driver for it, so it could be used as a hard drive replacement. It could even auto boot, just emulate booting a workbench disk with the drivers, mount the card and go on from there. How does that sound?

[tnt23]

Zac67 wrote:

I think you should keep the 'use this device as a card reader, too' in mind while making changes to the hardware. It'd be a very good chance to attach the emulator in such a way that it can be used to access the flash card in a more efficient way (faster and higher capacity access).
Maybe through serial (probably slow), parallel (lot of hardware involved) or through the floppy port, just with a more efficient protocol - after all, you don't really need MFM for transport.
If you provide the means of accessing the flash card for real, someone else will probably write a driver for it, so it could be used as a hard drive replacement. It could even auto boot, just emulate booting a workbench disk with the drivers, mount the card and go on from there. How does that sound?

Sounds reasonable. I was thinking of a similar approach looking at A500 non-booting IDE interface where there needs to be a system boot floppy allowing for later mounting IDE drive(s). Will keep that in mind, thanks.

Another thing I'd like to implement is multiple floppy images handling. The amount of memory emulator has now allows for at least 2 floppies to be stored and switched between. Imagine 1st image is Workbench disk (probably autoloaded from MMC card BOOT directory) and 2nd is some game or utility disk, and you can swap them in an instant.

[mrmkl]

tnt23 wrote:

mrmkl wrote:

...
...UARTs, you could read and write floppy-images from a remote computer via RS-232.

Amiga also has RS-232 port, this could be used, too. Some software support from Amiga side would be necessary, like drivers.

ZModem for RS-232? It is usually included with terminal programs. (as an amigaos library in libs:)