A while back there was talk of the ability to use a USB floppy with QPC
etc. As I have recently had to purchase a USB Floppy from Amazon (£10
delivered!) I decided to test it out and see what's what.
Linux:
On Linux, the drive plugs in and just works. It cannot read QL Floppies
without a QL5A/QL5B filesystem (yet).
QPC cannot see the device as flp1_. QPAC2's files menu also seems "no
medium" when I attempt to look at the files and SBasic retunes a dir of
win1_ (PROG_USE and DATA_USE set to win1) if I attempt to dir flp1_.
Windows XP:
When I absolutely have to, I run XP in a VirtualBox emulator VM. As
expected, the USB floppy turns up as drive A: and can be read from DOS,
Windows Explorer.
QPC happily sees the device and can read from it. QPAC2's files menu can
also see it and read it happily.
Windows 7:
To be tested.
On a similar note, I have downloaded Jonathan Hudson's qltools, qxltools
and wxqt2 from "The Dead Letter Drop" and attempted to compile them on
OpenSuse 11.4 running GCC version "gcc (SUSE Linux) 4.5.1 20101208
[gcc-4_5-branch revision 167585]".
qltools: needed a few changes to make it work. I can happily read from a
floppy image or from the device itself (/dev/usb_floppy), I can write to
and format new floppy images - I have not tried writing to my (precious)
floppies yet.
Formatting a floppy directly doesn't work, but formatting a floppy image
does. However, it formats "short" in as much as if I ask it to format me
an HD floppy image, I get a very short file and not 2880 sectors.
More experimenting to be done, but as far as images go, reading is fine,
writing is fine, formatting is fine (see above) as is getting directory
listings and info etc.
Physical devices allow directory listings, reading of files, writing is
still to be tried and formatting (of a brand new unformatted disc) fails.
qxltools: multiple compilation failures. Still working on this one.
wxqt2: Even worse that qxltools. :-(
I'm not sure what the score is with Jonathan's source code. I'm thinking
that maybe it could be put up on SourceForge as a project? At least then
there's a safe central place for future enhancements?
I'll update that as I experiment.
Cheers,
Norm.
--
Norman Dunbar
Dunbar IT Consultants Ltd
Registered address:
Thorpe House
61 Richardshaw Lane
Pudsey
West Yorkshire
United Kingdom
LS28 7EL
Company Number: 05132767
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