![]() ![]() The HxC Floppy Emulators support most existing floppy formats. The HxC Floppy emulators are designed to be very versatile and to support a large variety of computers / keyboards / samplers / CNC machines at a reasonable price. This electronic device emulate the floppy disk drive behavior and functionnalities. The HxC Floppy Emulator project main idea is to completely replace the floppy disk drive by an electronic device. See the showroom to have a preview of the currently supported machines. It now supports hundreds of machines and floppy formats. The project have grown with the various support requests received during all these years. I personnally started this project in 2006 to revive my Atari ST and Amiga machines and to make them easier to use in the incoming world without floppy disks and floppy drives. An alternative to the floppy disks is needed for these machines to solve the availabilty and reliabity issues brought by this old support. Video games, Retro computing, Music, CNC machines (manufacturing/industrial process). They are not open source, but their history has information that suggests to me that an mbed should be able to emulate a floppy drive with nothing more than some TTL interface buffer chips and the right software.Floppy disks have disappeared from the market many years ago, but surprisly the machines needed them still largely used in various domains : There is also the DiscFerret project ], ], ] which use just an ARM processor to read and write floppy drives. If it is not what you want, you might use it as a basis with the mbed replacing the PIC processor, but keeping the CPLD. The HXC2001 project that Daniel cited is open source. 1.44M) or 'fancy' data formats or speed variations may be beyond the mbed's capabilities, but I'll bet a Beagle Board could do those jobs with just some software :-). Interrupts from the step signal cause the track buffers to be written and read from the active image file. A tight loop in the main() routine keeps up with the DMA samples, and updates the bits in the track buffer. Writing could be added by having the write-data signal drive an external 'capture' pin that is set-up to grab a timer sample to a DMA buffer. Use that technique to create a FM or MFM read-data signal with 2.0 us timing slots from either of 2 track/head buffers of 12500 bytes each. The 640x400 VGA driver project code shows how to create a repeating bit stream plus a sync-pulse. There are mbed libraries for file systems on a USB 'gum-stick' drive and a 2-line LCD + push-button menu interface to 'mount' different disc images from the drive. Say for example you only need to emulate a '360K' drive with read-only media. They are not open source, but their history has information that suggests to me that an mbed should be able to emulate a floppy drive with nothing more than some TTL interface buffer chips and the right software. Finally, there is the Kryoflux project and it's predecessor the Cyclone20, , which use just an ARM processor to read and write floppy drives. ![]() Since it can both read and write, it might be amendable to conversion to a floppy emulator (again, with an mbed processor as the driver). There is also the DiscFerret project which uses a FPGA to read and write ST506 interface hard drives and floppy drives. ![]()
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