Re: I wonder if it would be complicated to design...

[Chuck Morris <chuckwmorris@gmail.com>]

Glad to hear that you've found the information to be of interest.  When Rich first announced that the original CFFA card was being discontinued and the CFFA3000 was being designed, quite honestly I failed to grasp how significant the increase in functionality would be, despite reading his list of proposed features.  It was only after I began using one that I really appreciated the redesign.

As for CF card compatibility, I've only used Sandisk cards, so I can't speak to that.  Since I use the CF card primarily to house hard drive images, I've had no compelling reason to try to extend the CF slot for easy access.  I rarely find new images that I need to add to the 4 GB CF, and the firmware upgrades that require a CF swap aren't likely to occur very often.  I'm content to crack the case open when I need to swap th CF card - so far, at least.

The USB slot is a different matter to me though, since I use it for floppy images, and I add new ones pretty often.  So for the USB port, I use an extension cable.

Another neat trick that I have found the CFFA3000 to be ideally suited to is as a tool for making NIB images of physical diskettes.  I simply load a virtual disk drive with an image of SST and a bunch of "blank" images assigned to the same drive so I can swap disks with the external remote.  Then I put the real floppy into a real drive and use SST to write it out to 2 of the "blank" images in the virtual drive.  Once that's done, I simply take the USB key to my laptop and use Ciderpress to merge the pairs of SST images into NIB images that I can test in Applewin.  If they work, then I copy the NIB images back to the USB key for use on the Apple.  I've hardly mastered the use of SST yet, but I've had some success creating usable NIB images using the default parameters.