HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Hi,

I took delivery of my HxC a few weeks ago. Build is excellent; Lotharek has done a great job.

My intention is to get the HxC to work with a Camputers Lynx 128K Disk system.

Before attempting this, I intended to familiarise myself with the HxC by getting it working with a PC, and I have now succeeded in this ( a pentium 1 200MHz running Windows 95). It works fine and I'm able to read and write to HFE images.

I have now moved on to progressing to using the HxC with my Lynx. I've connected it up ok. Powers up ok, drive select jumper seems to be in the right place (3rd from left down to middle for drive B: on a straight 34 way ribbon cable). The Lynx recognises it as drive B: as when I select it and do a DIR command the drive select light of the master drive goes out (as it's deselected) and the HxC's drive select light comes on (as it's selected).The HxC then scans across the 40 tracks in it's usual fashion and the Lynx then returns an error code, typical of an unformatted disk, which is what I expect. THe next step is to then format the space. On runnig the format command from the Lynx, the HxC scans the tracks again in some odd fashion and then hangs and the SD Card Access LED on the HxC goes out. This also leaves my Lynx hanging with no other option but to power down.

Jeff, I've tried the settings you suggested for making Raw empty images: IBM FM, 40 tracks, 10 sectors per track, sectors size 512, bitrate 500000 total size 204800 (which I think is right for the overall size) but no luck. I've also tried several variations such as Shugart, and Emu Shugart, FM as well as IBM FM and various combinations of Skew and Interleave.

I have also tried to make HFE images from IMD images which we have working with Pete Todd's PALE Lynx Emulator. These images were made with Dave Dunfield's Image Disk and all images work well in the PALE emu. Unfortunately they refuse to convert in the HxC Floppy Emulator app. Is there any chance you could take a look at the IMD images I sent to you and see if you can convert them?

Best regards,

John

Send me the IMD and HFE files, i will have a look to them.

Hi Jeff,

Many thanks, I've emailed you three Lynx floppy disk images; 2 which are Lynx DOS 200K and one which is Lynx CP/M 2.2 200K. I'm grateful for you looking into this and hope you can convert them into HFEs?

Best regards,

John

Are you sure that the floppy format is 40x10x1x512 in SD ?
the LDF files are in RAW files. this is not IMD files.
Can you try to dump a true camputers lynx disk with the hxc floppy emulator software?

Hi Jeff,

Many thanks for your reply. I'll look into finding out more about how we made our images with Image Disk. It could well be that we used raw image as the file format. I do not know enough about this. I will ask my friend.

I've had a further play this evening. I thought about how the Lynx disk system distinguishes between 200K and 800K floppy disk drives. When formatting disks, it tests the drive by stepping it to beyond track 40 and sees if the drive continues to send track increment pulses back to the controller. If it doesn't, then it knows it's a 40 track drive and formats accordingly. Otherwise, it knows it has an 80 track drive. There's no 40 track / 80 track hard switches as there are with the BBC micro! With this in mind, I thought the HxC will probably keep on sending track increment pulses back, and that's why it hangs when trying to format to 200K. So, instead, I tried to format to 800K. I set up four HFE images, adjusting Sector ID Start, and Reverse Side. None worked.

I'll report back on any further news as and when I can.

Best regards,

John

Maybe that you should activate the "double step" feature of the HxC Floppy Emulator.

Can you dump some disk with the HxC Floppy Emulator software please ?

Hi Jeff,

I've had another look into this. A couple of nights ago, I formatted a few 3 1/2" floppy disks with my Lynx and saved a BASIC program onto one of them. The aim now is to put this floppy disk into a modern PC and use the HxCfloppyemulator.exe software to do a disk dump to read this disk.

Unfortunately, when I tried this with my present desktop PC (a P IV on an Asus A7N8X motherboard), the disk dump status line said "Error: see Simon Owen's fdraw..." something. I presume this means the software is not compatible with my motherboard's floppy disk drive controller?

Best regards,

John

No this just mean that you need to install this driver :

http://simonowen.com/fdrawcmd/

Hi Jeff,

Many thanks for the advice about Simon Owen's Fdrawcmd.sys driver. I installed it and was able to read my Lynx 800K disk in my PC's drive, and to subsequently make a working .Hfe image. Putting this in to my HxC connected to my Lynx, I am now able to read test programs which I originally saved on the real 800K disk. The Lynx DOS also has a disk Check command which checks the media track by track and this checks all 80 tracks as OK.

So it now looks like we have working media!

However, I then moved on to trying to write to the image and to trying to format the image. Unfortunately I get an error on this. This is a hardware Lynx DOS code error called "Drive Not Ready". Unfortunately, invoking the format command, resulting in this error also trashes the .hfe image before any formatting has taken place, and hangs the machine again.

I'm going to have another fiddle with the jumper settings and report if I can resolve this.

Best regards,

John

First thing : can you send me the dumped hfe file please ?

Hi Jeff,

I've emailed to you 2 Lynx 800k images produced using the disk dump tool. The Lynx Check command shows all the tracks as good. However the image can't be formatted.

I've also sent two further images where the Lynx goes through the process of formatting and the HxC can be seen incrementing through the tracks, but which results in a failed format only at the end. The Lynx Check command shows all tracks as bad.

I hope this is ok?

Best regards,

John

Hi Everyone

Hope that someone can help, I own a real LYNX 96K and would like to attach a floppy controller, I downloaded the schematics from camputerslynxinfo website, but there is some errors in the schematics and also missing a lot of info, does anyone have a real floppy interface or a better schematic than the one on that website - a real closeup photo showing the wires and tracks would also help

You can mail any info to me - frank@elborg.dk

any help will be great

Thanks in advance

Best regards
Frank