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Re: CFFA Run 4: Accepting pre-orders



Scott Alfter wrote:

DOS 3.3 predates SmartPort by a long shot, so it only works with
5.25" floppies out-of-the-box.  There were hacks to get it to work
with 3.5" floppies, but it's such a brain-dead OS (non-hierarchical
filesystem!) that it's not worth trying to use it on a hard drive.

Hmmm, given that most games are DOS 3.3, I was wondering if it would be worthwhile doing a 'hack' or perhaps a different CFFA ROM that instead treated the CF as a multitude of floppy disk images. You could 'poke' into a CPLD register that 'bank-switched' the desired area of the CF into the active floppy disk image and then PR#6 (is that right?) to bootstrap the 'floppy'.

Obviously it requires special software on a PC, for example, to create the floppy disk images on the CF (or copy them directly from a real floppy drive on the A2 itself), and then firmware on the CFFA to 'emulate' a floppy drive.

Is this a sound idea?

Regards,

--
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, <http://www.vl.com.au>
21-25 King St, Rockdale, 2216
Ph: +612-9599-3255 Fax: +612-9599-3266