Re: Apple ][ using PC floppy

[alex.freed.007@gmail.com]

On Dec 30, 6:38 pm, Eric Rucker <bhtoo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 30, 8:15 pm, alex.freed....@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Dec 30, 3:22 pm, nyder <nyder...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > I'm a little lost as the useful purpose of this.   while i understand
> > > 5.25 dd floppies are hard to get, soon the 3.5 floppies are going to
> > > be hard to get.   Computers don't come with floppy drives anymore.
>
> > > wouldn't it be more practical to make a board that converts possible
> > > disk images to "virtual floppies" that the computer will just see as a
> > > floppy?  besides maybe a device driver to control which image your
> > > loading, you wouldn't have to hack the OS to get a fix that would
> > > break other floppy drives.
>
> > Funny that you mention it: a device pretty close to what you describe
> > does exist.
> > My PseudoDisk ][.
> > Seehttp://mirrow.com/FPGApple/pseudodisk.html
>
> > It uses .NIB images on a FAT formatted MMC/SD card as virtual
> > floppies. No patches needed.
> > It can also work with "hard disk" ProDOS images up to 32MB each, read
> > and write real fast.
> > Unfortunately there was very limited public interest in this (open
> > source) project and only one person
> > participated in the firmware development. Coincidentally the author of
> > this project - vladitx.
> > The main problem is that one need to reset the PseudoDisk to get to
> > the firmware that allows
> > to select an image to use. It's easy enough to write a simple program
> > on the Apple side to do it,
> > but it won't help to change the "disk" in the middle of a game.
>
> > -Alex.
>
> It's a bit of a kludge, but maybe a serial cable to a PC, for
> selecting images on the fly?

As a matter of fact there is a serial port on the PseudoDisk at TTL
level. Cables
are available ($20 at DigiKey) that connect USB to TTL level RS-232.
So it's easy
to add code (in "C") to the ATMEGA88. Again the project is all open
source.
If anyone wants to make their own modified boards they are welcome to
the PCB
design files.
If I may say so myself it's not a bad device: it can do pretty much
everything that CFFA
does (using MMC rather than CF) plus it can handle arbitrary NIB
images - DOS 3.3 or
not doesn't matter. Any image that works with emulators should work
too.
I forgot to mention the other big problem: only ProDOS images are
writable. NIB images
are read-only. Not because of any hardware restrictions but only
because nobody wrote
a read-write driver. I left that as an exercise to the readers :)

It is also possible to add functionality to the device. It has a 20
MIPS AVR uC doing mostly
nothing. Could be used for example as a math co-processor. Or a fast
and buffered serial
board. The question is does anybody need it? And the answer appears to
be "no".



-Alex.