[Coco] HxC2001 HeadQuarters : HxC Floppy Emulator

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

On 26/05/2011 20:11, Ciaran Anscomb wrote:
> "John W. Linville" wrote:
>> Seems similar to some other stuff discussed on the list recently --
>> apparently available today...
>>
>> http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html
>
> I have the one that takes an SD card.  Works a treat for DragonDOS (and
> so would be fine for RS-DOS).  Only thing I've not managed to suss is
> single density disks, but that's not really relevant here.

I have one of these too, and as Ciaran says works perfectly well with 
DragonDos, and so should be ok with RS-DOS, even worked on the Alpha 
before I correctly setup it's 2797, when it wouldn't boot of real disks !

I believr that the BBC micro crowd have got the HxC working with single 
density DFS disks, so might be worth taking a look at them. The only 
instances where this would be applicable to the CoCo/Dragon are that 
some of the Flex disks I have are single density. OS-9 also supports 
having a single density track 0, and double density for the rest of the 
disk, the Dragon Beta/128 disks are like this.

> As a hardware replacement for a floppy drive, it's great, but still
> requires you to have a controller cart.  AIUI what Darren's working on
> is something that presents just like an original controller: I'd still
> be really interested in that (especially if it supports the 2797 variant
> with DragonDOS supplementary logic :).

Indeed though something like a microcontroler and a CPLD that emulated 
disks through images would be almost as good, especially as we have 
assemblable source/disassembilies for Dragon/Super/RS dos, and for 
NitrOS9, which can be modified to work with such a setup. Guess the only 
place this would not work is with naughty code that talks direct to the 
hardware.....

Cheers.

Phill.


-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.