but presents itself to an OS as a Mass Storage Device (block device).
Anders, for what practical purpose would you do that?
It’s not like there’s so many 8 inch floppies around to make it feasible.
You would have to have a LOT of intelligence in the Usb interface due to
the different physical formats let alone the software formats.
It would be difficult.
On Fri, 8 Sep 2023, Anders Nelson via cctalk wrote:
Hi Wayne,
For sure the controller would have to do a lot more, but I know firmware
pretty well and BIOS/ancient OSes not at all! 😅
It would still be handy to have a USB device that operates as a "normal"
fully functional FDC.
It would make it possible to add floppies to devices without them, and/or
add more or different floppies to devices that do have them.
The basic software for it could be in flash RAM in the same USB device.
Source code for the IBM PC BIOS was published.
For floppies, you need Int13h, and there is a table of parameters pointed
to by Int1Eh.
Handling formats other than PC, auch as CP/M, P-System, TRSDOS, MS
Stand-Alone BASIC, Mac "1.44MB", etc. would require additional code.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
