Connecting floppy drive to run old software?
Cass (2747) 6 posts |
I have a large collection of software/games for the Archimedes computer that I’m probably going to sell and I have been trying in vain for the last few days to get either of my Archimedes computers up and running so that I can test the games. |
Chris Mahoney (1684) 2100 posts |
I don’t know about RISC OS specifically, but unfortunately most USB drives can’t read disks that are larger than 1.44 MB. This affects old Mac and OS/2 disks, and would probably affect 1.6 MB Acorn disks too. |
Chris Evans (457) 1614 posts |
Cass: Even if you got around the problem of getting the discs loaded on a Pi ‘most’ Archimedes games didn’t work (without some update) on a RiscPC 600 or StrongARM. Pi’s are a couple of generations on from that. So only extremely well behaved games with no copy protection and probably written in BASIC have a chance of working, so less than 1% chance of Archimedes commercial games working on a Pi I suspect:-( I suggest you get a Pi anyway for a bit of nostalgia. You might get hooked again:-) |
Chris Mahoney (1684) 2100 posts |
Yep, that’s the other issue, although ArcEm and ADFFS help (not flawlessly). |
Steffen Huber (91) 1945 posts |
Standard USB floppies are not compatible with Filecore floppy format. Direct USB floppy support would need a driver for KryoFlux. For the moment, your only option is to image your floppies on a PC and use ADFFS to mount the image and provide the necessary emulation layer to allow the old games running on the Pi. Only classic Pi is supported by ADFFS at the moment, by the way. |
Cass (2747) 6 posts |
Thanks for the replies guys but it sounds like a non-starter unfortunately. If I understand things rightly if I got a usb 3.5" floppy drive for my pc then I could used ADFFS to read an image of the disk and save it to my pc – does this get around the 1.44MB/1.6MB disk discrepancy problem or would I need a specific 3.5" drive to do this? With the image then saved to the PC I could used ArcEm to possibly run it although by all accounts and as Chris Evans says this has a slim chance of working? |
GavinWraith (26) 1532 posts |
Is that 50 years? Well I am more than half as old as you again, and I can reassure you that the RPi, especially version 2 with RISC OS 5.21, is a delight. Go on, be tempted – your experimenting days will never be over. The RISC OS community needs young people like you :). |
Dave Higton (1515) 3404 posts |
I’m also a lot older than you, and I hope I never stop experimenting. I would commend the same attitude to you! |
Richard Walker (2090) 416 posts |
You can get equipment to archive floppies, but it’s not cheap! The discs might be of interest to JASPP – http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/index.php |
Raik (463) 2026 posts |
I’m near 50 years old and I use Acorn Computer since 1992 but my experimenting days are began 2010 with my first Beagleboard and I hope not ends ;-) I have save my old “treasures” with this and I can use (read) the Images witch ADFFS in ArcEm and ArchiEmu. |
Chris Mahoney (1684) 2100 posts |
At 201, I’m starting to wonder whether I’m the youngest here! 1 In hex ;) |
Cass (2747) 6 posts |
Thanks for all your replies guys – this post seems to be turning into the age appreciation society. ;-) |
Steffen Huber (91) 1945 posts |
A standard USB 3.5" floppy disc drive will not be able to image ADFS floppies, it is only compatible with standard DOS floppies. You need a “true” floppy (e.g. an old PC with a floppy disc drive) or something like KryoFlux. |
Cass (2747) 6 posts |
Well I’ve had some mixed fortunes today. Decided to open up the Arc’s monitor as my ever reliable PC was taking over 6 hours just to shut down. Had a fiddle with some of the internal dials and managed to stabilise the picture just enough to read that it was a keyboard problem (A410/1 keyboard evidently faulty) so connected up the A310’s keyboard. Pressed delete and rebooted and could see RISC OS boot up in a very scrolling image. Had another fiddle with the dials and got a beautiful stable image. |
Cass (2747) 6 posts |
Back to the bad luck today. I’ve got two very old PCs with internal 3.5" floppies, neither of which will boot up (one faulty psu, one dead hard drive). I’ve taken the drives out of both of them and neither will work with the Archimedes – just get a drive empty error message. Tried WD40 on the squeaky bit of the A310’s floppy but with no luck. I’ve got two newer PCs including the one I’m typing this on but neither of them have a slot for an internal drive but I have connected an external USB Floppy which I understand will not be able to read the Archimedes disks whatever I do. Has anyone got any other suggestions or is this completely dead in the water now? I started reading about ADFFS, Omniflop & a few other bits and pieces and my head started to hurt after a while as I became more & more confused. Seemed to be saying I needed this and then this and then this and so on and so on unfortunately. My brain definitely doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it used to. Thanks again guys. |
Theo Markettos (89) 919 posts |
There’s a wiring difference between PC and Acorn floppy drives: this APDL article has the gory details of how to convert. For the PCs, can you swap the HDD or PSU from one PC into the other? I think that’s your best bet as regards something to create floppies. You could create FAT-format floppies with a USB drive on your PC, but they’re a bit annoying to use in RISC OS. |
Cass (2747) 6 posts |
Thank you very much Theo. I’ve checked the article and I will certainly bear that in mind as a last resort as I’m not 100% confident with the soldering iron and not even sure my two PC FDDs are in working order anyway. I’m also not sure about a couple of bits as I have an A410/1 and the two PC FDDs are Teac & Mitsumi and the instructions are, as you say, a little gory. Thought I’d contact the author for some help and then realised it was written by Dave Holden who very sadly died last year. However, I’ll definitely bear it in mind. No luck swapping things on the PCs either – PSUs are incompatible with each other and the same Master Hard Disc failure message is shown whichever HDD I connect to the PC so might be a fault on the motherboard. Thank you very much again for the help, much appreciated. |
James Hansen (2753) 2 posts |
I was thinking about this myself today – thankfully I imaged most of my floppy disks some time ago, but it sure would be nice to connect up a USB floppy drive directly to the Pi for disks I missed. After a bit of googling I found this thread over on an Atari ST forum – seems like some USB floppy drives are more capable than others http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=23253 |
Theo Markettos (89) 919 posts |
I’m afraid that thread just goes to show how broken some USB drives are. The USB floppy spec covers HD, DD and (I think) SD formats. A drive might not support them, but not supporting DD is pretty lame. The Atari ST format is closely related to DOS, so I wouldn’t have expected many problems. Unfortunately the common denominator is that DOS formats start numbering their sectors from 1, while Acorn formats start numbering from 0. The numbering-from-1 is baked into the USB floppy spec, with the result that reading an Acorn floppy wouldn’t be able to read sector 0 – which is pretty awkward, as you might imagine. Given that even standard USB floppies are on the way out these days, I think a Kryoflux-like solution is the only long term answer. |