Well, its another day, and some good news for the QL at last :-)
We have now successfully tested the HxC Floppy Disk drive emulator with
the Sinclair QL home computer, meaning that you can now copy raw images
of Sinclair QL disks to an SD card, and then connect this floppy disk
drive emulator to your QL's disk interface and read/write to an SD card
instead of floppy disks.
The latest v3.0 of Q-emuLator supports raw disk images, so when that is
officially released, you should be able to use that to get software into
the raw disk format required. Then all you need to do, is to convert it
using the supplied HxC software, copy it to the SD card and then hey
presto, the QL sees it as a floppy disk! At the moment, I can only get
Q-emuLator to read from raw disk images, although Daniele is working on
raw disk image support.
You can copy any number of floppy disk images to your SD card, and then
use the buttons on the front of the control panel to set up which disk
image is to be seen by the Sinclair QL as FLP1 and which is to be seen
as FLP2.
Currently, it only appears to support DD disks, although I daresay it
will work with other disk types if I had some raw disk images of QL HD
and QL ED disks to try (I cannot make them on my PC).
Ideally, we need to find some power supplies which can be used to power
these units - at the moment, we are using an old external floppy disk
case. Also, for some reason, both the Gold Card and the MicroP disk
interface we have here needed the cable the other way around to the QL norm!
This means that the HxC Floppy Disk Drive Emulator available from
SellMyRetro.com
<http://www.sellmyretro.com/search/naturalSearch?keyword=hxc> has now
been shown to successfully work with all of the following equipment as a
complete replacement for the good old floppy disk drive:
* Any computer / piece of equipment that uses PC formatted floppy
disks (3.5", 5.25" or even 8" drives)
* Atari ST/STF/Falcon
* Amstrad CPC6128
* Commodore Amiga (currently write only)
* Dragon 32 / 64 (VDK or JVC disk format, which should also
therefore work with the Tandy CoCo)
* Emax and Emax II Sampler
* Ensoniq Mirage Sampler
* Korg DSS-1 Synthesizer
* MSX2
* Oberheim DPX1 Sampler
* Oric Computer (with MicroDisk)
* PC
* PC88
* SAM Coupe *.MGT and *.SAD formats
* Sinclair QL raw disk images
* Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 or Sinclair ZX Spectrum with PlusD disk
Interface
* Super Wildcard DS-SWC3201
* Thomson TO8D
* TI99/4A
* x68000
--
Rich Mellor
RWAP Services
http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk
http://www.rwapservices.co.uk
-- Try out our new site: http://sellmyretro.com
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