Dear Rich
I can format QL HD disks with QPCII and my usb floppy. Is it proper for you?
I alxo can format HD with my QL gold card and HD floppy
Do you want to format one and send you for testing with HxC?
or you want something more complex?
Yours
Michael
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Rich Mellor" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2010 12:42 PM
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Ql-Users] Getting the Sinclair QL to use an SD Card
On 28/08/2010 10:14, Tobias Fröschle wrote:
Am Mittwoch, den 18.08.2010, 08:07 +0100 schrieb Rich Mellor:
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:
Well, Rich,
you haven't got much of an echo to your announcement - probably
accounting for summertime and holidays. I myself find the achievements
you made with the floppy emulator quite remarkable.
Some questions:
- does the equipment come bare-bones or is there some sort of housing
for the PCB? (I'd rather not have open PCB tracks lying around
considering the state of tidyness my desk is usually in...)
- How far have you come regarding ED emulation? Any achievements made?
I think, given the storage space an SD card offers, ED emulation is a
strong one on the wish list.
- Does the emulator accept SDHC cards (above 2 GB) - You seldomly find
smaller ones nowadays.
Cheers
Tobias
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Hi Tobias,
Thankyou for your comments - I need to pull this into an article really
for the magazines so long as people don't mind the self- promotion aspects
of this, as I sell the unit!
The floppy emulator comes without any external housing unfortunately -
although all I did was to sellotape it to some cardboard and then attach
that to an old disk drive case (which also luckily provided me with a
small psu).
I agree that ED and HD emulation must be possible - but I would need a raw
image of a QL formatted HD and/or ED disk in order to test this. I cannot
easily make one of these at the moment as I am stuck with a USB floppy
disk drive - can anyone please make a raw image of these disk formats,
using rawread / rawwrite and I shall see - I can send the two DOS based
programs if anyone wants to make a disk image for me.
The emulator accepts any size of SD or HC card up to 32GB so that should
not be a problem.
--
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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