Epson serial floppy drives emulated with Arduino and SD-card

[fjkraan]

Hi All,

Recently I managed to get the PFBDK sketch from William Cooke working AND have it in a cool case. Currently I am working on extending the code to make it somewhat more flexible and maybe even more convenient.


The code is at https://github.com/electrickery/pxdisk_mega, more images are at https://electrickery.nl/comp/tf20/pxdisk/

Greetings,
Fred Jan

P.S. It is all a distraction for the Oval-simulator, but at least I'm working with the Epson's again .

 

[Fezzler]

I built one of these. Slightly different. But it can swap files and drive images. I think the BACKPACK (BPD+) sold by Hey Birt! also works with the PX8/HX20.

 

[fjkraan]

Hi @Fezzler,
Cool device, I hadn't seen it before (but I wasn't really looking). Build like a professional product with custom case, image management and firmware update build in. But alas closed source. OK if you just want to use the device, but not if you want to know how it works and maybe extend it. That is the fun for me .
Greetings,

 

[RetroHospital]

The backpack of Jeff / Stardust works with the px8 with an adapter board ( I have one )

Imho however It’s more meant for Tandy MT - making it work with Epson requires flashing the firmware and adapters - and then you need to reflash to use the M100 again - so it’s a bit of a pain .

 

[fjkraan]

To make the PFBDK more versatile, I created some CP/M programs for the PX-4 to manage the images mounted on the drives. It is quite minimal and not properly tested yet. But the nice thing is that the programs uses some custom created epsp commands added to the PFBDK firmware. PX-8 (or universal) versions will be added later.

PFDIR4 - display SD-card root directory
PFMNT4 - mount a SD-card image file to a drive
PFNEW4 - create a new empty image on the SD-card
PFWP4 - manage write protect flag of a drive

Fred Jan