HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

It's possible with an "hack" with a switch on the signal DS0 of the floppy cable to change between the HxC and the internal drive.

Thanks for answering all my questions Jeff, greatly appreciated. I will be placing an order within the next few days for my HxC2001.

So does the HxC work in conjunction with the Akai S950 without any issues or are they any 'tweaks' or modification that will need to be performed? I seem to remember reading a post on another forum explaining that the HxC was somewhat unreliable with the S950 due to not enough signal current being supplied on the data lines and that it in order to resolve this problem a resistor had to be applied. Is this the case?

Yes, if you got problems, you can do this little mod.

When you get time perhaps you could post some further details of this mod for us S950 users. Any chance you could upload some photos showing where this resister needs to be applied?

ok i will do this soon.

That would be great Jeff, thanks.

I just can confirm. A long cable doesn´t work with mine.
I tried the cased model of the HxC on the 950 with the short cable and it works pretty good. (Thanks to everybody in this topic for all the infos and files)
I connected a "normal length" cable and the diskimage is not working (unformated).

@Jeff : I found a post of you in another forum about changing a resistor. did you get some feedback, if it workes? I will try to change R18 on the S950 .

No, no feedback. if you can make the test this would be great. just add a ~4.7k pull-up resistor on the data line /RDATA (wire 30 of the floppy cable).
http://pinouts.ru/Storage/InternalDisk_pinout.shtml

Here´s the feedback. It works. I found a 4,6kohms resistor in one of my boxes . As I had the 950 open anyways , I exchanged R18 on the lower board. You will find R18 on the left side close to the floppyport.



Now I´ll try to build something for the external cased HxC. I think of modifying the RS 232C Port by connecting the floppycable. Outside I will use a SCSI cable . On the end of the SCSI, I´ll build an adapter (DSUB 25 to floppyplug) to the entry of the HxC.
There will be a switch to choose between the FD and the HxC

Let´s see how far I get

So just to confirm; swapping the resistor allows the HxC to work using a longer floppy cable?

I am planning on purchasing an external, boxed HxC and mounting this either on top of my S950 or to the side and running the cables through the ventilations grills after removing a small section.

Asides from the cable length issue which now appears to be resolved by the resistor mod, are there any other problems that I am likely to encounter?

That´s what´s up so far.

Check it out



I also did a little video about it. No saving here, but you can see me loading up stuff from the internal floppy and then from the HxC (external cased version)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXXgH6I2SrQ

Sometimes you still get a error message , that the disk is not formated (on both drives) . but if you press disk again, it works fine then.

The connection of the switch was a little tricky this time. It´s connected to the RS 232 board. It also needs a little modification on the ribbon cable that leads to the internal drive.

When I have build up everything , I´ll send you more pics and a new video.

Here we are. External cased model of the HxC , connected over the modified serial port RS 232 via SCSI cable.

Checkt out the Video. Switch to choose between the drives is in the front of the 950.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYXwhYYvA2g

As the S950 supports HD floppys, is it possible to create a HD HFE file for the AKAI950?

Are the CFG settings different?

Depends on the hardware.
Usually HD disks have a bitrate twice as high, and twice as much sectors, and that's it.

I tried to change the settings for creating a emty disk in "Raw File format configuration" .

I changed the settings "sector per track" to 10 instead of 5

But I did not change the bitrate.

I will try that.