HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Not sure what I am doing wrong but when I power up the MPC with everything attached the emulator powers up too but the MPC just starts running through scsi ID's trying to find something like the disk drive isnt there

EDIT: I think it may be seeing it now but it says 'disk error' then asks me to insert the os disk..

I have an image of the os disk on the card, in the hfe extension..

Maybe I've done something wrong by the looks of it

Send me your hfe file.

It seems to see it as a drive now, and tried to load up from boot disk images I have made but doesnt boot, just keeps asking for me to insert the boot disk.

I will send u the hfe file along with the image of the boot disk I have made

I just sent you an new image to test.

Worked perfectly! Thank you

How did u get the image to work? What settings did u have to set?

I have so many disks I need to image, in the couple of 100 mark.. also have to make some blank but im guessing it shouldnt be too hard to image some blank ms dos disks with the correct settings

Regards

In fact you have to force/change the interface mode to "IBM PC 1.44MB" into the settings window before exporting.

You can also dump your disk with winimage, and convert imz images with the HxC software. The beta HxC Software now support imz files :

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emu ... t_beta.zip




No need to dump blank disk ! you can create dos disk with the "Create FS Floppy" button.
You can also get blanks images there :
http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emu ... Images.zip

Now that all is working can you make a picture or video ?

Excelent! Thank you Jeff

I will get this up and running and will post some pics and videos once done, thats not a problem!

Excited to get this running now, really looking forward to it

Regards

Hello again,

Im still having a slight problem when loading disk images.. although it is now working it is taking much much longer then it should.

Booting up from that os disk image is no problem, and it takes the same time as it does from floppy disk, but when I load my data disks that I have imaged and converted to hfe format it takes over 15 mins per disk compared to just a few mins it usually takes from floppy disk..

To experiment further I waited for one to load (after a few attempts thinking each time it had frozen or something), then when everything had eventually loaded (loaded fine I must add, just way too slow) I formatted a blank disk image to the mpc format in the machine and then saved my project to the new image which then saved fine and as fast as it would to floppy.. it also loaded from the newly saved image fine, while this was happening I noticed something......

When booting from the os disk image u helped me create the sound of the emulator clicked away just like the drive would, seemed to have the same clicks, pauses... etc etc. When saving / loading to new blank image formatted in the machine it also clicked away consistantly just like it usually would to / from floppy.. BUT when loading an image I have imaged from one of my data disks and converted to the hfe file, I noticed the clicks are very few and far between.. It seems there is at least 10 - 20 seconds per individual click.. compared to a consistant clicking I otherwise get when booting or saving / loading to / from a new image, or while formatting a blank image.

Which seems to point to my data disk images (or whatever images I create this end) not being correct.. the machine can obviously find the data there, and load the data, just seems to take very long to load it.

Im wondering if when I image my disks, that I am only getting the data from the disk and not the disk settings or something it may have in the label or something telling the machine where to search or how the data is layed out or something.

I tried following ur instructions as exact as possible, although in winimage I cannot seem to find the floppy disk dump tool, so I have been 'reading' the disk using winimage, then saving the image and converting that.. so maybe that way its only reading the files on the disk and not other parts of the disk it should do??

For now I can kind of work around it, by waiting the 15 - 20 mins it takes to load each disk into the mpc, and then re saving that data onto a new blank disk image and deleting the previous that took so long to load.. but as u could guess if I had to do this for every existing disk I need to convert its likely to take me weeks if not longer.

Once this problem has been ironed out Im going to make a video of the emulator working with the machine, booting, loading and saving data etc, as well as include some photos from my installation as I had to disasemble the machine and cut some power cables inside to extend them to be able to connect the emulator externally (well just outside of the drive bay) as the power cables at their natural length doesnt quite reach, which should be helpful to others with my machine who may be looking into one of these emulators (which I would definately recommend to them).

I hope I've explained clearly without saying too much, thought it would be better to give a long explanation rather then not include info that may be important.

Its obvious the emulator works fine with my machine, seems the problem is only down to the images I am making from my disks on the pc,hopefully it shouldnt be too difficult to fix but im a lil stuck myself.

Regards

This is an interleave/gap3/skew setting problem.
Can you send me the "long" data disk floppy image (hfe) ?

EDIT : for this reason it's maybe more intersting to use the hxc dump tool : this one keep the disk interleave / skew setting.

No problem I'll drop that over to you now

I'll also send you the one I have loaded on the mpc and re-saved to a new image to convert it correctly the long way around



I hear exactly what your saying, the whole time I've been thinkin if only I could have just installed an internal floppy drive would have probably bypassed all of these issues, even had an internal floppy drive sitting around just didnt have the space in the pc to be able to install it

My very silly mistake, the attachments were too large to be sent via email .. I have since compressed them into a rar

They should be with you now

Regards

ok the problem is in the new imz loader. by accident the gap3 was set to 0 ...

should be better with the attached software.

Excelent Jeff thank you! worked perfectly first time!

I will commence recording now and upload some footage to youtube for you, bare with me on that.. as I want to get a quick project rocking to give a good view of it working, and I'll also probably run into format conversion problems with the video files lol