Thanks for that, Simon!
It certainly would be nice to be able to use the external floppy
drives these days, since, as you said, the normal internal kind seem
to be dying out. Though as you said, easier now with cards...
Just to show my ignorance... from what you're implying, can a Trinity
SD card be read to and written to from Sim Coupe already then? I'd
just automatically assumed it wouldn't be compatible immediately. :-D
Quoting Simon Owen <simon.o...@simcoupe.org>:
This is becoming more of an issue, with Macs and newer desktops not
having a motherboard floppy controller, and more widespread use of
laptops...
Almost all USB floppy drives are usually limited to 720K (9-sector)
and 1.44M (18-sector) formats. They contain their own floppy
controller chip, and the LBA to CHS mapping is done within the unit.
Unfortunately that means there's no way to access the 10th sector
on regular SAM disks. SimCoupe relies on being able to talk to the
floppy controller directly, using my fdrawcmd.sys driver under
Windows or the kernel fdrawcmd interface under Linux.
I have been thinking about support for USB floppy drives in
SimCoupe, working within the 9-sector limitation of USB drives. It
would require disks to be prepared for access on a real machine (or
using SAMdisk), so SimCoupe can recognise them as special, and to
reserve the 10th sector on each track to prevent data being saved
there. On the SimCoupe side, the 10th sector in each directory
track would be faked as holding the same reserved/hidden files. The
disk could then be used as normal on both SAM and SimCoupe sides,
but with 702K rather than 780K available for data.
Nowadays it's probably easiest to use an Atom Lite interface on the
SAM side and share a CF card between SAM and SimCoupe (or indeed a
Trinity and SD card). It gives a centralised store of all your
work, and avoids the reliability issues with floppy disks – just be
sure to back it up periodically in case you lose it!
Si
On 5 Apr 2011, at 12:19, war...@wdlee.co.uk wrote:
Just as a side issue, with regards to Sim Coupe... (sorry for the
quick change of topic!)
This is probably a daft question, as I think I've read about the
issue elsewhere, so forgive me... but is there no way to read/write
to external USB floppy drives? Just thinking of my own case, and
others are probably similar, where I use my laptop 99.9% of the
time these days (and of course modern laptops don't have a built-in
floppy drive.
Not to mention, there are increasingly fewer desktop systems that
include floppy drives these days anyway, so even people using
desktops are increasingly likely to find it easier using external
plug-in drives.
Is it a complete impossibility? ;-)