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? ;-)




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