That's great, thanks! I'll try that with my Trinity SD card later...
The main thing I'm interested in, is being able to create stuff in Sim
Coupe on my laptop, and just get it onto the real SAM for testing with
ease. So if it's possible through the Atom emulation and/or SAMdisk,
that'll do the job! When I get the chance to test it, I'll post back
and let you know how it worked. :-)
Thanks for all the help!
Quoting Simon Owen <[email protected]>:
Hi Warren,
The enclosure would still only work if the laptop motherboard had a
regular floppy controller chip, and I'd be surprised if any have
included one in the last 5 years. The actual floppy drives
themselves are pretty dumb, so it's all about what you've got them
connected to. There are some modern USB-based low-level floppy
solutions, designed for software preservation, but they'd be
overkill for most SAM use (and cost 50GBP+).
I'm a bit fuzzy on the details of the Trinity SD card format, but I
think it's pretty much the same BDOS format used by the Atom
interfaces (perhaps using Atom Lite byte ordering). I remember
there being an issue with some cards not using 512-byte blocks, so
it might be best if Colin filled you in on compatibility. Of
course, you'll be working with the plain Atom emulation on the
SimCoupe side, as it doesn't emulate the Trinity interface.
SAMdisk supports BDOS devices too, so you can list, get directory
listings of, and copy to/from individual records. If you already
have a Trinity-format SD card, try a samdisk list from a command
prompt, to see if the media is recognised. If you're on Vista or
Win7 you'll need to have launched the command prompt with
Administrator rights too, to have permission to open the raw disk
devices – the same applies to SimCoupe using them, for now.
Si
On 5 Apr 2011, at 13:11, [email protected] wrote:
Thanks for the fast reply! :-)
I suppose in theory, an internal-type drive in an enclosure would
be plausible, but by the time you get to that, and the rarity
probably of even enclosures for something like that and the added
drivers, it defeats the purpose. Oh well... Worth finding out! ;-)
On an alternate route, I wonder if Colin could create a small PC
program that would allow transferral of .dsk files to the allocated
slots on a Trinity formatted SD card? Though again, I have no idea
how plausible, as it would depend on the way the Trinity formats
and stores things on the SD card.
Obviously it wouldn't make sense to have Sim Coupe emulate the
Trinity, as the point is to have a device that people want to buy
because it allows their SAM to do something they can't possibly
emulate. But a .dsk transfer utility to and maybe from the Trinity
SD cards might be useful? Just thinking out loud! ;-)
Then again, a completely nutty route... Since the Trinity will very
possibly have FTP at some point, file transfer could be done in a
round about way, by uploading or downloading files lol! So in
theory, if you don't have a handy built-in floppy drive, you could
develop in Sim Coupe, upload to your website, and then download to
the Trinity. Sorry Colin, my ponderings are jumping all over the
place lol! ;-)
Quoting Leszek Chmielewski <[email protected]>:
The USB Floppys have a extremly cut down controller which is
missing ability
for low level access. So the answer is no. My Acer TM312T has a external
parallel port Disc drive, and it can read and write Coupé Discs, only
because the BIOS. It would be possible to make a USB Floppy which can use
SAM discs, but not in a standard way. And it would also need new drivers.
2011/4/5 <[email protected]>
Just as a side issue, with regards to Sim Coupe... (sorry for the quick
change of topic!)
This is probably a daft question, as I think I've read about the issue
elsewhere, so forgive me... but is there no way to read/write to external
USB floppy drives? Just thinking of my own case, and others are probably
similar, where I use my laptop 99.9% of the time these days (and of course
modern laptops don't have a built-in floppy drive.
Not to mention, there are increasingly fewer desktop systems that include
floppy drives these days anyway, so even people using desktops are
increasingly likely to find it easier using external plug-in drives.
Is it a complete impossibility? ;-)
Quoting Simon Owen <[email protected]>:
On 4 Apr 2011, at 16:02, Simon Cooke wrote:
If SimCoupe uses rdtsc without setting the CPU thread affinity, there are
issues on some systems where it loses track when the thread is scheduled
onto another CPU core. Usually a bios update can fix this, or
switching to
use QueryPerformanceCounter.
It did use QPC, but only for sub-system profiling within the emulator
