Thanks! I recently put together some notes on the Floppy Emu that might help future Mac liberators:
Steve at BMOW has yet to add the directions for setting up the HD20 in the
Floppy Emu user manual (as of 2018-08-01), so here it is.
The HD20 option works well for a Macintosh Plus or an SE, but not great for a Mac 512k or a Mac SE/30, and not at all for an original Mac 128k. For the Mac 512k, you can use an HD20 hard drive, but you first need to boot from a physical floppy disk in order to load the "HD20 Init" - so it can see the HD20 drive. For Mac 512k's with FUBAR physical drives, that's a problem. Steve says: "The Mac 512Ke, Plus, SE, Classic, Classic II, Portable, IIci, IIsi, and LC-I have HD20 support built into ROM".
You can use any sized SD card for the Emu, but you want to limit the size of your virtual Hard Drive, because 1) you won't need 2GB for System 6 or below, and 2) it takes longer to load larger disk sizes, and 3) it's easier to copy the disk image back and forth when it's small. For System 6.0.8, I used the blank 224M.DSK file from Gryphel, because I found that a 20MB is not big enough. Rename your disk image to HD20.DSK (the name doesn't have to correlate with the disk size). It's easy to create your own blank DSK files using HFExplorer, but I won't go into that here.
Mount the HD20.DSK image in Mini vMac. Mount the System installation files for the OS that you want to install on the HD20.DSK. I used 6.0.8, because I'm using it on a Mac Plus. Run the System Installer for the System software, and choose your HD20.DSK as the target - and install the system. For 6.0.8, I mounted all four *.IMG disk images before installing so it wouldn't ask me for Disk 2, Disk 3, etc. Now copy all the apps/games you want to the HD20.DSK - you can see why Mini vMac is so helpful here. Your HD20.DSK is ready to be copied to the SD.
All(?) SD cards come pre-formatted with FAT32. Floppy Emu requires the SD to be formatted with FAT32 - make sure that it is.
- Copy the HD20.DSK to the root of your SD.
- Put the SD in the Floppy Emu.
- Plug your Emu in to the vintage Mac external floppy port, and start the vintage Mac. The Floppy Emu defaults to floppy disk mode.
- To change the mode from floppy disk to HD20:
Press the Reset button, then press Select. You'll see a list of modes, one of which is HD20.
- Use the Next button to scroll to HD20, and press Select.
- It tells you to reboot the computer.
- Make sure the floppy drive is empty, and reboot the computer.
You now have a bootable hard drive.
Update the Floppy Emu to the latest firmware
Steve's instructions are broken into two parts, probably because he thinks of them as two independent things. However, for us end users, this is one process with several steps. Here are instructions that work better for me:
See this
video demo of the firmware update process.
- Download and unzip the latest firmware from BMOW for your particular computer (Apple II, Mac, or Lisa).
- Copy the files, firmware.xvf and femu.bin, to the root directory of your SD card.
- Insert the SD into your Floppy Emu (attached to the computer), and turn on your computer.
- Hold down the NEXT and PREV buttons, then press and release the RESET button, still holding NEXT and PREV, until the CPLD firmware update process begins (about 3 seconds).
Wait 10-15 seconds for the process to complete - the status LED flashes while updating.
- The LCD displays "RESULT: SUCCESS" (Note: this does not complete the update process).
- If you see a "wrong CPLD" warning, don't worry; this is normal.
- Hold down the SELECT and PREV buttons (Note: these are not the same buttons as before), then press and release the RESET button, still holding SELECT and PREV, until the AVR firmware update process begins (about 1 second).
Wait 5 seconds for the process to complete - the status LED flashes while updating.
- When finished, the LCD displays self-test information and the main menu.
- Confirm that the new firmware version number displays on the self-test/info screen during startup.
