I think your floppy emulator is quite interesting and the IC used on the PCB makes it a very flexible platform.
I have some questions and doubts want to know. Feel free to reply them when you want, just I'm quite curious about your nice project:
I really don't understand why C64 floppy emulation can't be supported, since there are hardware that can emulate it with only a pic like said previously on other post (and your site too) with the 1541-III. I already readed your reply about this on another forum post, but maybe adding a serial port inside the board and other people adding support to emulating that kind of drives could be possible, since this seems an open project
The 1541-III is a PIC microcontroller controlling an FAT16 MMC/SD card with .D64 files. It is connected to a Commodore computer via the standard IEC-bus (the serial bus normally used to connect diskdrives and printers).
Because the circuit is based on a PIC microcontroller and not a fancy FPGA or 65xx processor it will never act 100% the same as an 1541. This is the main reason why fastloaders will not work as on a real 1541.
Why not supporting C64? If it's about not having the hardware, say it and you will receive a C64 computer for free.Limitations:
No fast loader support.
None of the Commodore DOS functions beside LOAD and SAVE works.
Few, if any, D64 games with loaders work.
No long filenames.
DSK and EDSK CPC image file support is coming soon, that's great for the Amstrad community. I have various CPC machines here, most of them with broken disk drives (if you want one of them, say it).
It will be technically possible to support platforms like TRS-80, Heathkit, Apple ][ et TI99/4a as the Semi-Virtual Diskette (SVD) does? What about others like MSX and ZX Spectrum?
You can ask for donations for support other systems, or setup your project on Sourceforge or similar for starting a collaborative project under some open license at your election ( like GPL, LGPL, MPL our your own "free for non-commercial use" license).
You can start some kind of community like MIDIbox does: http://www.midibox.org
I also found this product from some unknown guys from India (Krishna Software) with a pre-1995 style website: http://www.krishnasoft.com/sps.htm
Their product seems quite simple in hardware, but makes possible to control the input ports (joystick, mouse and keyboard) ports from the PC. I found it quite interesting, as it's like using Synergy2 by hardware even on old machines, and depending on less native hardware so you can control all your machines with only your PC/MAC.
Maybe with some kind of geeky port, your board could be able to do that stuff and even converting input devices (PC mouse to amiga mouse, PC mouse to SNES mouse, PC keyboard to amiga keyboard, PC keyboard to MSX keyboard...).
(1) DB25->DB9/RJ10/Flat8 (for Amiga 500/1000 and Atari 400/800/XL/XE)
(2) DB25->DB9/DIN5 (for Amiga 2000/2500/3000)
(3) DB25->DB9/mini-din (for Amiga 4000)
(4) DB25->IDC34 (for disk drive simulation on all Amigas)
What about making that? Maybe the CPLD/FPGA is capable of that, or just adding a cheap PIC for that task.Depending on which peripherals you need to simulate and which machine you have, you would need one or more of the abovementioned cables. MPDOS has been tested with the following Atari computers so far: Atari 400, Atari 800, Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE, and Atari XEGS, but it should also work with other 6502-based Atari computers. MPDOS has been tested with the following Amiga computers: Amiga 500, Amiga 1000, Amiga 2000/2500, Amiga 3000, and Amiga 4000, but should also work with other Amiga models. The joystick simulation and mouse simulation will also work with Atari ST(e) series of computers using any of the first three cables mentioned above.
A CPLD/FPGA like this seems so flexible that could be nice if doing a little more. Maybe it even will could emulate stuff like datasete of carts for atari 2600/5200/7800 or Megadrive/SNES. Sorry, I have too much imagination.
What do you think? Maybe a board like this can be the Swiss Army knife of vintage world, being an all in one solution of a lot different simple hardware.
This is only a sugestion as I'm very happy something like this appears for us the users. I just want to provide ideas for the project and a hardware floppy emulator was one of my retrocomputing dreams.
PS: Maybe your project needs a bit more of promotion. I was lucky and found your site on an amiga.org forum post (see here
).
