RiscOS without floppy support
Pages: 1 2
Paolo Fabio Zaino (28) 1821 posts |
@ all Please calm down. This discussion has been going on for a while and AFAIR also on multiple threads. The user, in this case Micky, has tried various approaches (RPi, RPCEmu Virtual Acorn) to read old floppies, none of which worked (at least not in the full extent he needs). The problem is that all the USB based modern floppy units have a chip that locks them to DOS logic format 1.44MB, and they can’t be used with anything Acorn, Commodore, Atari etc… (this is a very well known issue in the retro community). Software wise, one could use Virtual Acorn on an PC that still has the Floppy internal interface and that should probably give some result. BUT Micky also had another hard requirement, which is the NetWare support which won’t work on Virtual Acorn (because VA doesn’t really has proper network support). NetWare does work on RPCEmu, but RPCEmu doesn’t have support for floppy direct access and this is for good reasons, no one (except from Micky has requested such a feature or needs it on a daily base). So the only solution for Micky (and that IS the only solution) is to buy a RiscPC on eBay, but, according to what Micky has said, they are too expensive for his pockets. So, unless someone has some old hardware to give him for cheap money, there is NO possible solution for ALL his requirements (which, again, it’s not just the floppy disc access). People have tried to help him and on multiple threads, so please don’t judge people who have got tired of having multiple threads with the same questions. Micky has also mentioned that all of this is for fun, because that is what he likes to play with: NetWare and floppy discs, so no life threatening situation is depending on this.
There is an already completed WD1772 reimplementation on FPGA: https://github.com/Torlus/firebee-fpga/blob/master/FalconIO_SDCard_IDE_CF/WF_FDC1772_IP/wf1772ip_top_soc.vhd (sorry VHD) There are also pseudo drivers for the Amiga emulator on PC to use the greazeweazle HW as a floppy controller. The code is not hard to understand, but it will need some work to be adapted to RISC OS and personally I am not interested in the effort. I don’t know if anyone here is. With that said, Micky has clearly expressed no interest in the work needed to port the driver or workout a device for the FPGA based WD 1772, so, not even who requested this has motivation strong enough to pursue the work. He actually sounded like “we” (aka some of us) must do the work and for free because “he” needs it. That to my knowledge is rude (aka “I demand that you do it”), but I understand that some people may just express themselves in such a way without wanting necessarily to sound rude. However, when we do this, we can’t expect the world to open the doors to us (I am sure that given the average age here, we are all aware of this). HTH |
Jan Rinze (235) 368 posts |
I have a Greaseweazle V4. |
Jan Rinze (235) 368 posts |
The 1772 VHDL code seems quite good. |
-Micky (10269) 143 posts |
I know that RiscOS for Raspberry Pi is free. I bought some software for RiscOS like: Messenger Pro I would pay for it if it has floppy support. One free version and one commercial version. This is a good idea I think. |
Pages: 1 2