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Problem with FloppyEmu
- Thread starter Anonymous
- Start date
Johnnya101
Well-known member
First, try formatting the SD card and install a fresh driver (I know its called something else... cant think of it) for Mac. Try again? Make sure youre in floppy mode, and also, I dont believe you can open 1.44 HD disks on a Plus through a floppy emu.
I had a similar issue with mine and my portable. Certain disk images would bring up errors and not mount. I just used different ones.
Those floppy emus seem to be fussy at some times.
I had a similar issue with mine and my portable. Certain disk images would bring up errors and not mount. I just used different ones.
Those floppy emus seem to be fussy at some times.
The device required a driver, presumably it did something roughly akin to the HD20 (or Apple II SmartPort drives) and used the floppy data channel as a glorified serial port. Although, I dunno, I'm reading some Google Groups links that call it a "1.6MB" drive, I suppose it's also possible they used a trick like they did to make 1.44MB floppy drives work with the Amiga's built-in controller, IE, cutting the rotational speed by half, or a similar expedient.
It was capable of reading and writing standard 1.44 MB floppies. I guess it might also have supported some other odd size, but the point of the thing, IIRC, was to give the old Plus compatibility with the new big floppies.
Did it really need a driver? For some reason I thought it was a bootable device, but my memories are old and flimsy.
Did it really need a driver? For some reason I thought it was a bootable device, but my memories are old and flimsy.
Drivers for it are in the various old mac software archives. I suppose it's *possible* they could have made it bootable by emulating/abusing the HD20 driver, since we know now that it's technically capable of handling arbitrary sized block devices, but I'd be surprised if that was the case. Seems like Apple pretty thoroughly kept the details of the HD20 protocol under their hat.
Its driver may well work similarly to how the HD20 driver for the 64k ROM macs worked which was indeed overriding the ROM floppy driver with an enhanced replacement in RAM. (Basically the same driver the Mac Plus has in ROM.) Just color me skeptical that the AEHD+ can do that without a driver disk. (I mean, sure, it would be technically possible to have the drive emulate an 800k drive for the IPL and instead of booting directly off the mounted floppy it sends a "pre-boot" it has stored in ROM to the Mac that patches out the floppy driver and triggers a secondary boot, but unless someone has evidence it did that it sounds like a stretch to me.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but given the fact that the FloppyEMU already supports an HD20 mode that allows arbitrary size disk files and has a driver already present in the Plus (and 512ke) ROM why exactly would one really *need* 1.44 MB floppy image support? Why not just copy the contents of such images onto a hard disk image in an emulator (I believe vMac has no problem mounting them) and go to town?
CC_333
Well-known member
Well, yeah. You're right, of course. There's no valid reason why one would want to use 1.44 MB disk images when they can either create an arbitrary HD20-style image or copy to a hard drive of some sort.
However, it would still be kinda fun if someone figured out how to install a driver that allows an otherwise stock Plus to run a SuperDrive at full capacity (to accomplish this with the Applied Engineering AEHD+, they probably installed some sort of driver).
This is, of course, mostly an academic exercise, as the Floppy Emu, for all intents and purposes, renders most real floppy-based solutions unnecessary.
c
However, it would still be kinda fun if someone figured out how to install a driver that allows an otherwise stock Plus to run a SuperDrive at full capacity (to accomplish this with the Applied Engineering AEHD+, they probably installed some sort of driver).
This is, of course, mostly an academic exercise, as the Floppy Emu, for all intents and purposes, renders most real floppy-based solutions unnecessary.
c
Someone might, but I don't. What I do know is:
The floppy mechanism is a standard (unless stealth modifications were done) laptop style PC floppy mechanism manufactured by Citizen. Between the floppy interface and the Outbound is a circuit board. The circuit board contains an 85C30 (I think this handles whatever comm protocol that goes between the laptop and the floppy assembly), a WD37C65 floppy controller, a WD92C32 data separator, a 64Kb flash chip and a single 20 pin GAL PLD. Oh, and there's a Xicor (XC9030, IIRC) digital potentiometer, which almost certainly plays some part in the variable speed control of the floppy spin speed.
On the Laptop itself, in addition to the Apple ROM on a SIMM, there are two 64Kb Flash/EEPROM chips which contain configuration code of some kind. These chips are updated when the Outbound installer runs. I know that they contain information on what internal device is installed (floppy vs. 20, 40, 60, 80 MB hard drive) and hte data is different for each size hard drive. They could also contain an extended floppy control routine.
All the components are fairly simple, and there's only the two places where code could be stored in Flash (counting the pair of chips on the Laptop as a single place).
The floppy mechanism is a standard (unless stealth modifications were done) laptop style PC floppy mechanism manufactured by Citizen. Between the floppy interface and the Outbound is a circuit board. The circuit board contains an 85C30 (I think this handles whatever comm protocol that goes between the laptop and the floppy assembly), a WD37C65 floppy controller, a WD92C32 data separator, a 64Kb flash chip and a single 20 pin GAL PLD. Oh, and there's a Xicor (XC9030, IIRC) digital potentiometer, which almost certainly plays some part in the variable speed control of the floppy spin speed.
On the Laptop itself, in addition to the Apple ROM on a SIMM, there are two 64Kb Flash/EEPROM chips which contain configuration code of some kind. These chips are updated when the Outbound installer runs. I know that they contain information on what internal device is installed (floppy vs. 20, 40, 60, 80 MB hard drive) and hte data is different for each size hard drive. They could also contain an extended floppy control routine.
All the components are fairly simple, and there's only the two places where code could be stored in Flash (counting the pair of chips on the Laptop as a single place).
