Re: Pseudo-disk *almost* ready for the big time.

["Alex Freed" <alexf@mirrow.com>]

> I'd be interested in something like this but my biggest question would
> be how would I go about transferring the disk images from my Mac Mini
> to the SD card? I'm assuming the SD card would be ProDOS formatted, so
> I'm not even sure if the Mini would recognize it without trying to
> format it.

Is the Mini running OSX? If so, no problem.

The SD card is  ProDOS formatted if you are using the ProDOS mode,
(essentially the same as CFFA but using different media)

CiderPress is happy to read/write such cards.

In the (more unique) nibble mode the card contains raw nibblized images of
140k
floppies.

It is trivial to write either kind of images to the SD card under a
UNIX-like OS:
Linux and (most likely) OSX.
"dd" does a great job of copying images to raw storage devices.

I have also written a simple command line program for Win32 that adds images
to the card.

I had several plans:
1. Teach the AVR to read FAT so that images of .nib floppies could be
written
     by drag-and-drop.

2. Make a GUI for my utility that will create a directory of images visible
at Apple's
   boot time.

The problem is the apparent total lack of public's interest for the project.
48 hours after the announcement the web page was viewed 120 times, but
exactly zero requests were made to get a board. So I guess production
boards are not likely to happen. I'm a bit surprized because apparently the
CF
interface cards are selling real well. By board does everything pretty much
the same
PLUS is provides a virtual DOS 3.3 disk for software that is  not ProDOS
compatible.
Maybe it's just too early to tell or maybe the world doesn't need it.

-Alex.