Steno Machines

HxC Floppy emulator support for all others computers...
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jmsteno
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri May 25, 2012 7:26 pm

Steno Machines

Post by jmsteno »

Hi,

New here. Tried searching for answers on the forum but did not see anything related.

We work with several old court reporter writing machines. These older machines have slim 3.5" HD floppy drives installed in them. The system boards use a special format called "Stentura" which gives about 1MB. We have some competitors who came out with a single USB floppy drive replacement that has been somewhat successful, even though it would still have to format a 4GB Flash drive down to 1MB. The industry however is demanding more then just a single USB drive backup solution. So we are looking for a dual backup solution that we can retrofit into these writing machines. Idealy, the unit will write to either two flash drives, two SD cards, two MicroSD cards, or better yet a combination of flash drive/SD card. I understand there may be no way around the 1MB limit that the system board formats these to, which is fine for most of our clientele.

After a lot of searching, I came across the HxC Floppy Drive Emulator. You seem to be the most resourceful in retrofitting solutions such as this. Do you offer any emulators with dual backup solutions? Thank you in advance for your time. If we are able to find a solution, we would like to market this device to court houses all over the United States.

Jeff
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Re: Steno Machines

Post by Jeff »

Mhh i don't see what is the purpose having 2 medias support in the emulator ?

FYI With the HxC Floppy emulator , you can put more than 8500 disk images on a single 32GB SD Card.
You can also emulate 2 disk drive (if the host support this of course).

jmsteno
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri May 25, 2012 7:26 pm

Re: Steno Machines

Post by jmsteno »

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for the quick response. The reason we are looking for a "dual" device is because the court houses in the United States are requiring these old writing devices to write information to one more additional device to be an accepted recording system.

It stands to reason that if the writing device fails to write to one of the "dual" devices, it will most likely fail writing to second of the "dual" devices. However it still fills the court houses requirement at this point, even if just an illusion so to speak.

Even though the device can emulate more then one disk drive, the court houses want a second physical device to record information to. New machines cost around $5,000 USD so if court reporters could retrofit their older machines to meet the courts requirement, I'm sure they would be interested.

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