Using the HxC Floppy Emulator

[sixxie]

A few of us got these from the festival (from http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/) - they couldn't guarantee it would work with the Dragon, but I saw no reason it shouldn't, and indeed, it works just fine. So here's how to use it.

You will need: Dragon with DOS cart. 5V supply for the board. Way of running a Windows application (Wine is fine). SD card (oh, and the images you create are pretty large, so a USB2 reader/writer is probably a good idea - try to avoid having an old GP2X as your only way of accessing SD cards).

The home page for the project is here: http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/. Go to "Download", fetch the HxCFloppyEmulator software and unpack it.

Format an SD card to FAT32.

Run HxCFloppyEmulator.exe. Select "Drive -> SD HxCFE settings file", configure to your taste and click "Save". The default filename of HXCSDFE.CFG is what the device will look for, so accept that. Copy that file to your SD card.

Prepare a raw disk image. This needs to be an image without any headers, so for VDK or JVC images, calculate the image size modulo 256 and trim that many bytes from the beginning of the image. e.g., if the file size is 184332, (184332 % 256) == 12, so delete 12 bytes from the beginning of the file (leaving 184320 bytes which is 40 * 18 * 256).

Still in HxCFloppyEmulator.exe, select "Load Raw image". For a typical DragonDOS disk, you want to set "Number of track" and "Two sides floppy" to the appropriate values and the rest of the options to:

Track type: MFM
Reverse side: leave unticked
tracks ... grouped: leave unticked
GAP3 length: 24
Sector ID start: 1
Sectors size: 256
Interleave: 2 (otherwise it'll be very slow)
Sectors per track: 18
RPM: 300
Bitrate: 250000

Then click "Load RAW file", and select your image. It will load in, and return you to the first menu. Select "Export", give it a name to write to and click "Save. That should be it! Copy that to your SD card, unmount the card and put it in the floppy emulator.

Hook your floppy emulator up to its power source, connect it to your DOS cart and power everything on (probably doing this in the time honoured "devices first, then Dragon" order is a good idea, just in case). You might need to experiment with drive IDs depending on what cable you're using. I'm using a PC cable with a twist, and having Drive A configured to ID3 works for me.

Use the buttons on the board to select Drive A, then pick your image file and try accessing it. Tada! If not tada then perhaps post here and we can (hopefully) sort out why.

[admin]

I will be adding two VDK tools plus source code shortly to the download area that can add/remove the VDK header...


Please, those who bought one confirm which VDK files work and screenshot which settings were used - If we can get this working 100% reliably it will be brilliant.

[sixxie]

For my part, I've tried 40TSS, 40TDS and 80TDS (the NitrOS9 boot disk) so far with seemingly no issues.

[prime]

I will be adding two VDK tools plus source code shortly to the download area that can add/remove the VDK header...

Would those be addvdk and rmvdk If so hold of and I'll email you the latest version of rmvdk.c as I had to patch it for modern gcc.....

Please, those who bought one confirm which VDK files work and screenshot which settings were used - If we can get this working 100% reliably it will be brilliant.

I'll have a play once I'm back from my hols.

Cheers.

Phill.

[RWAP]

This is great work - and it was good to meet everyone at the VCF and see the Dragon Professionals!

[dragondata]

looking at the manual it looks like it can emulate a 'twin floppy' drive system, is this correct?

[RWAP]

Yes it can emulate a twin floppy drive (presuming the Dragon supports it).

Have a look at the jumper settings (around p10) for some ideas. Once you have the jumpers correct (not sure which settings are required here), you can then use the buttons to select a disk image for drive A and drive B.

[RWAP]

Native support to import VDK images has now been added to the software - see http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emu ... r_soft.zip

Please let me know if there are any problems here

Oh and if anyone wants to purchase an interface, they are available from: http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/detail ... ves%29-684

[admin]

Native support to import VDK images has now been added to the software - see http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emu ... r_soft.zip

Please let me know if there are any problems here

Oh and if anyone wants to purchase an interface, they are available from: http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/detail ... ves%29-684

Now thats service !!

If any of you re still using your real dragons, or looking for a way to load the disk images on this site onto real dragons... then buy one of these. Simply use the software to convert the VDK format disks to ones this device supports, copy the files to an SD card and connect the device to the Dragon using a DragonDOS (or compatible) cart.

Expect to see these being used at the next show we attend.

The biggest challenge is getting a 5v power supply to the device - it uses a standard 3.5" floppy power connector so making up a cable to supply 5v from something isn't going to be that hard - might even be possible to get the Dragon to supply the 5v.

[sixxie]

That's pretty excellent. Now the batch convert function can do every disk at once in an instant.