HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Hi there,

I just received my SD HxC Floppy emulator (version C with firmware 1.6.0.0) and I immediately connected it up to my Emax. After putting some disks onto my SD card, I gave it a quick check and it ran ok. Then a little later, I loaded one of my disks and did a few changes. When I then tried to write back to the SD, it gave out a click before the Emax display stated: Disk Error. The HxC display alternated between RA and WR a few times, then just stops on RA. There's no other text apart from the usual current sector text. This is on the disk that I loaded the sample from.

When I tried to format a disk within the Emax, the Emax gives out the error: DATA LOSS ERROR! The HxC display gives out the error message of: WEOE

This is quite a pain, as one of my main uses of the Emax is to sample things and thus save them onto disk to use later, and from the website it looks like the HxC should be able to write (even if it can't format a blank disk - which if it can't, how should I prepare a blank disk for the Emax?)

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I've now tested this on my Amiga 1200, and I was able to rename a directory on the emulated floppy. So it is able to write ok in that instance, so the question is whether the firmware is working ok for the Emax, or if there's something wrong with the connection between my Emax and the HxC... (I should say that the Emax is able to write ok to normal floppy disks - so I don't think that's failing). Any ideas?

please post here a picture of your emulator (i want to see the jumper setting) and send me some of your file images.

Here's the photo of my HxC:



Thanks! I've just sent an email with the disk images in.

There's a new development -- whilst checking the HxC with the Emax, I found that the disks are being saved to (at least when making new presets, I haven't tried to see if it saves new samples yet). However, whenever you do the save process, the Emax display states "Disk Error" (but the data is being written). All very curious!

I'll try and save a new sample to see if that saves ok, or if it is only saving relatively minor changes only. Formatting still isn't working, but I could just dump one of my blank disks (which was previously formatted in the Emax) and then copy that for 'blank' disks.

Formatting isn't supported on any platform so far. Copying a blank disk is one way, the other is knowing the settings and using the "new/load raw" button in the HxC software to create an image with these settings.

Yeah, that's what I thought - though I did create blank disks using the new/load raw button in the software, and the disks are still coming out as unusable in the emax (which kinda makes sense, since the OS needs to be baked into the disk - which is why you need to have the .emx file in the same directory as the .em1 files when importing) -- so copying a blank disk seems like the only way for now.

Does anyone else with an Emax get the Disk Error message when writing (though the writing still happens)? If that's just a side effect and everything else works ok, then I can live with that.

when you write something "big" (ex: a sample) , can you read back it after a power up?

Can you try to move the jumper to ID3 ?

I just sent you another file image to test.

Hi Jeff,

I've just tried writing a 8 second sample, and it gave the disk error message after 3 quick WR pulses. I then rebooted the emax to see if it actually wrote it (which was obviously doubtful as it should take up a reasonable number of sectors), and it only saved the very first quarter of a second or so. (presumably the first packet of data)

This happened with the jumper on ID0, and also when I changed it to ID3, with the file image you sent me.

can you try with another sdcard ?

Aha - that seems to have done it. I've just tried with a SanDisk 16Gb SDHC card and that's writing perfectly fine. So it looks like the original sd card I used (a Kingston 2GB SD card) was to blame.

Thanks!

Ok

This may happen when the sdcard it very slow during writing....
... or when some of its sectors are damaged...