virtual floppy drive using PP and RT LInux

[telengard]

I'm wondering if something like this was feasible. Using a computer running RT Linux (probably a small embedded computer) driving the parallel port to act like a floppy drive. There are some products out there that do it, but are mostly FPGA/microcontrollers.

Sounds like it could be a fun project. I'm going to look into it more.

~telengard

[schotty]

It is doable. I have a cable for doing this with my pc and commodore 64/128. I bought a cart that had the software to talk to the pc (dos running some server software and connected via a serial cable) and assign a disk image to the drive. Havent played too much with it. I plan to create a dos vm on my Fedora desktop to do the server of the images and see how that works out. If it does, I can post to vmware an appliance of it to d/l.

As for other systems, I am sure something could be arranged. Atari, Amiga, Apple, Dos/Win32 even.

[mbbrutman]

There are significant differences on how floppy drives interface to systems, and that affects the feasibility of using this technique.

I understand the C64 floppy drives are pretty much computers in their own right, and they communicate using a serial data stream. That is really easy to simulate with a PC.

For a floppy drive connected to a system in a more conventional way through a controller things are much more difficult. The floppy drive is returning information at a much lower level (flux transitions?), and the controller and generating the data. You would have to simulate the functions of the controller in software and find a solution fast enough to handle the raw data from the floppy drive.

[Sharkonwheels]

Speaking of virtual floppy drive...

Is there software to emulate drives on your PC, under XP?
For example, create a virtual a: , 5.25", so I could TeleDisk something to it, and then use it in an emulator? Or just to image disks to it, so they can be read?

Tony

[Speedz]

Shark I think you might find these useful?

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html
http://www.freewarereview.info/2006-03/virtual_floppy_drive_-_floppy_disk_imaging_and_virtualization_part_ii.ht ml

I did a search in google for "virtual floppy" and those were the first that came up.

[lynchaj]

I'm wondering if something like this was feasible. Using a computer running RT Linux (probably a small embedded computer) driving the parallel port to act like a floppy drive. There are some products out there that do it, but are mostly FPGA/microcontrollers.

Sounds like it could be a fun project. I'm going to look into it more.

~telengard

Something like this? (about half way down the page)

http://www.krishnasoft.com/sps.htm

Apparently the Amiga is able to connect a PC to its FDC and make the PC act as a giant floppy disk drive. Certainly a useful tool, especially if it were general in nature and could be used on FDC.

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch