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HxC SD card diskette emulator for 5.25 and 8" disks on Cromemco systems

smplfyi

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 31, 2007
Messages
259
Location
Warwickshire
Dear All,

I recently made a blogpost regarding the integration of HxC into my Z80 / 68000 Cromemco system.

To summarise It works fine so far, supporting 2 emulated diskette drives simultaneously.

Each drive can be 5.25" or 8" and the diskette formats I have working include CDOS Cromix and Uniform


http://majzel.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-hxc-solid-state-diskette-emulator.html

I am still testing and when complete there will be a second article with test cases and results.

I feel it's a major step forward in software archival ... the original diskettes and drives can only last so long :)


Regards Marcus B.
 
Unless I misunderstand, the HxC is only good for those floppy formats that are known ahead of tine--and for which someone has written software to emulate, no? So, when you're staring at a pile of, say Fairchild Sentry floppies, with no actual hardware, who writes the software for the HxC?

I offer this only in that archivng of floppies seems to be only a secondary objective, where emulation is the first.
 
I recently made a blogpost regarding the integration of HxC into my Z80 / 68000 Cromemco system.

To summarise It works fine so far, supporting 2 emulated diskette drives simultaneously.

Yes, I'm very happy with mine to as a TRS-80 Model 1/System 80 disk drive solution. When I get some time I want to see which other of my machines will benefit from this device. The Amgia 500 is certainly in the sights, but there are a number of others I could wire this thing up to.

Tez
 
Unless I misunderstand, the HxC is only good for those floppy formats that are known ahead of tine--and for which someone has written software to emulate, no? So, when you're staring at a pile of, say Fairchild Sentry floppies, with no actual hardware, who writes the software for the HxC?

I offer this only in that archivng of floppies seems to be only a secondary objective, where emulation is the first.

No, not necessarily : The HFE file format used with the HxC is a physical track oriented floppy image format.
It stores the low level encoding of the floppy (FM/MFM...)

This means that you can provide blank HFE files and just format them with the machine.
That's why the HxC floppy is compatible with a lot of machines without particular effort or firmware update.
Here is the main difference versus the others solutions using sector raw images (*.img...)

Of course there is a Mac/Windows/Linux software allowing you to convert/export/analyze the HFE files to/from others file format.

About the software : i am writing it, but every one can do it too since the sources are under gpl and available there :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hxcfloppyemu/
 
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