Hello,
I have a Lafumat controller with two 3.5" floppies connected. They work great!
All of the disk images I have to work with XROAR (some of them with my own programms) are in VDK format
and I wanted to copy them to a real disk for my Dragon via the serial port, so I made the cable too.
I made a little Java program to work as a server. It's a very small one and by now it always serves the same filename
so I have to rename the VDK I want to transfer before every execution ... I will change this later ( laziness!)
On the other side I made a little assembler program to do the big work (some 310 bytes).
My plan was to use all of the Dragon's RAM in order to reduce the number of chunks to transmit.
I chose to pass lots of 8 tracks (144 sectors). As sometimes there are communications problems that force the block to
be trasnmited again, I decided to send an XOR checksum for every sector (256 bytes) and added a little protocol to get
the transmission synchronizable.
The ACIA is set to 19200 and only one stop bit, the same on Java.
By now I have 'copied' this way all of the Dragon Computer Consultancy disks (some 44 disks) plus a few more.
The problem is that this method is time consuming. The trasnmission never reaches the configured speed due to handshaking.
In fact I put timer controls at the server and can say that it takes 7 minutes 45 seconds to copy a full disk (180K).
In my setup, a DISKCOPY 1 TO 2 needs some 3 minutes and a half, so as I can work with the PC at the same time, I don't mind.
Hopefully I will change the serial cable for the Centronics-USB bitbanger one despite that will mean to change the send
and receive routines at the Dragon side, an interesting work anyway.
I hope to have time to try the programm made by rolfmichelsen to send the works on my Dragon to the PC, that
means a backup and besides they can be used on XRoar, good work Rolf!
Pere