FM Towns II

[rosewood]

Has anyone had success in running the HxC with a japanese FM Towns II computer?
I searched this forum but had no matches with the search term "towns".

I installed it in my FM Towns II Fresh-E computer, and the access led was lit the whole time, until I removed the plastic nose of the floppy connector and plugged it in the other way around.
Now it tries to access the images I created, but all it does is changing between "WR" and "RA" on the display a couple of times and then finally gives up.

I have two kinds of disk images available:
1) .BIN files with a size of 1.20MB/1,232KB/1,261,568B, those can be written to regular floppy disks with OmniFlop and work fine in the FM Towns.
The HxC software has troubles with it and crashes when loading the image file. It does load them "RAW" though, but I don't know the right parameters and used the standard values.
2) .D88 files with a size of 1.22MB/1,252KB/1,281,968B, those cannot be written without errors to regular floppy disks with OmniFlop and don't work in FM Towns. They are the main reason I bought the HxC device.
The HxC software however has no trouble in loading and exporting them.

Any help with this is higly appreciated.

[Jeff]

Has anyone had success in running the HxC with a japanese FM Towns II computer?
I searched this forum but had no matches with the search term "towns".

I installed it in my FM Towns II Fresh-E computer, and the access led was lit the whole time, until I removed the plastic nose of the floppy connector and plugged it in the other way around.
Now it tries to access the images I created, but all it does is changing between "WR" and "RA" on the display a couple of times and then finally gives up.

I have two kinds of disk images available:
1) .BIN files with a size of 1.20MB/1,232KB/1,261,568B, those can be written to regular floppy disks with OmniFlop and work fine in the FM Towns.
The HxC software has troubles with it and crashes when loading the image file. It does load them "RAW" though, but I don't know the right parameters and used the standard values.
2) .D88 files with a size of 1.22MB/1,252KB/1,281,968B, those cannot be written without errors to regular floppy disks with OmniFlop and don't work in FM Towns. They are the main reason I bought the HxC device.
The HxC software however has no trouble in loading and exporting them.

Any help with this is higly appreciated.

The "WR" seems strange: this means that FM Towns try to write something ? But what ?

Do you have the FM town floppy pinout ?
Can you send me one .D88 image and one .BIN file ?

[rosewood]

The "WR" seems strange: this means that FM Towns try to write something ? But what ?

Do you have the FM town floppy pinout ?
Can you send me one .D88 image and one .BIN file ?

Unfortunately I don't have the pinout, but it uses standard 3-mode pc floppy drives.
The drive I took out to replace with HxC is a TEAC FD-235HG:
http://www.teac.co.jp/dspd/product/magn ... -235c.html

When browsing through my floppy images I noticed that some of them have the extension .HDM instead of .BIN
.HDM files are loaded fine with the HxC software (77 tracks/2 sides). Renaming .BIN to .HDM works too now, without crashing the software.

Anyways, here are two random floppy images:
http://uploaded.to/file/478w0klc

Thanks a lot for your help!

[Jeff]

The "WR" seems strange: this means that FM Towns try to write something ? But what ?

Do you have the FM town floppy pinout ?
Can you send me one .D88 image and one .BIN file ?

Unfortunately I don't have the pinout, but it uses standard 3-mode pc floppy drives.
The drive I took out to replace with HxC is a TEAC FD-235HG:
http://www.teac.co.jp/dspd/product/magn ... -235c.html

When browsing through my floppy images I noticed that some of them have the extension .HDM instead of .BIN
.HDM files are loaded fine with the HxC software (77 tracks/2 sides). Renaming .BIN to .HDM works too now, without crashing the software.

Anyways, here are two random floppy images:
http://uploaded.to/file/478w0klc

Thanks a lot for your help!

It rotate at 300 or 360 RPM into the FM town ? Bitrate ? 250Kbs/s or 300Kbs/s ?

What about the WR message ? This is not normal (floppy cable failure ?)

Is there an schematic of the FM town somewhere ?

[rosewood]

It rotate at 300 or 360 RPM into the FM town ? Bitrate ? 250Kbs/s or 300Kbs/s ?

What about the WR message ? This is not normal (floppy cable failure ?)

Is there an schematic of the FM town somewhere ?

built-in diskette drive: 1 or 2 3.5'' 1.25 megabyte drives. The rotational speed thereof is 360 rpm, and volume per sector is 1024 bytes.
(according to http://www.ktjdragon.com/ktj/towns-1/wh ... ns-english)

Information about this type of computer is hard to find.

I'll look for a replacement floppy cable and check that later.

[Jeff]

It rotate at 300 or 360 RPM into the FM town ? Bitrate ? 250Kbs/s or 300Kbs/s ?

What about the WR message ? This is not normal (floppy cable failure ?)

Is there an schematic of the FM town somewhere ?

built-in diskette drive: 1 or 2 3.5'' 1.25 megabyte drives. The rotational speed thereof is 360 rpm, and volume per sector is 1024 bytes.
(according to http://www.ktjdragon.com/ktj/towns-1/wh ... ns-english)

Information about this type of computer is hard to find.

I'll look for a replacement floppy cable and check that later.

Ok so can you try to use the HxC Dump tool to read an FM town floppy disk and send me the HFE files ?

[rosewood]

Ok so can you try to use the HxC Dump tool to read an FM town floppy disk and send me the HFE files ?

Yes, I've got an old PC with 3-mode BIOS, that should work with an original FM Towns floppy disk drive. I'll try to dump a disk with that later.

[Jeff]

Ok so can you try to use the HxC Dump tool to read an FM town floppy disk and send me the HFE files ?

Yes, I've got an old PC with 3-mode BIOS, that should work with an original FM Towns floppy disk drive. I'll try to dump a disk with that later.

No no dump it with a normal pc floppy disk drive. Since i know the PC RPM and the FM Town RPM i will get the true bitrate.

[rosewood]

Ok, I installed fdrawcmd.sys on my PC and dumping right now a FM Towns system disk.
I used the standard settings (double sided/80 tracks) and it is being dumped @1000kbits/s
If you need other settings (f.e. 77 tracks) tell me

[Jeff]

Ok, I installed fdrawcmd.sys on my PC and dumping right now a FM Towns system disk.
I used the standard settings (double sided/80 tracks) and it is being dumped @1000kbits/s
If you need other settings (f.e. 77 tracks) tell me

that sucks... This means that no sector are found...
Maybe you should use a 3mode floppy disk drive finally...

[rosewood]

I made some progress today.
First of all it finally works in the FM Towns with a new floppy cable.
Read access is fine, write access not tested yet.

Dumping a disk on normal PCs worked too, with a 3-mode floppy drive...

PC1/Dump1: 0 Sector(s) Read, 0 bytes, 0 Bad sector(s) @1000kbits/s, MFM
PC2/Dump2: 162 Sector(s) Read, 82944 bytes, 0 Bad sector(s) @1000kbits/s, MFM
PC3/Dump3: 108 Sector(s) Read, 55296 bytes, 0 Bad sector(s) @1000kbits/s, MFM
PC4/Dump4: 0 Sector(s) Read, 0 bytes, 0 Bad sector(s) @1000kbits/s, MFM
PC4 w/ 3-mode drive/Dump5: 1272 Sector(s) Read, 1302528 bytes, 0 Bad sector(s) @8 sectors, 500kbits/s, MFM

I've uploaded the dumps to http://uploaded.to/file/mapc2aw5 if you still need them for analysis.