HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

I have a question, and I'm sorry if this has been answered elsewhere but I couldn't find it. I am thinking about making host menu software for a few classic computers, but I need to know how exactly it works, how it is accomplished before I can begin. The machines I am thinking of doing it for are: Fujitsu FM-77AV40SX, Sharp X1 TurboZ, Sharp MZ-2500, Sharp X68000, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 3+, and MSX TurboR for now. Is there any particular requirement for a system to be able to work in that mode? How is reading of the SD card and selecting of images accomplished over the floppy interface? If I can get these questions answered, perhaps I will be able to accomplish this. Thanks so much for your help.

All is there :

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emu ... s_mode.pdf
http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emu ... G_file.pdf

http://hxcfloppyemu.svn.sourceforge.net ... yEmulator/
http://hxcfloppyemu.svn.sourceforge.net ... _selector/

For 8bit computers with low RAM my version of the HxC host software might be easier to port.
http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/thomson/browser/Thomson/code/C/HxCHost

It's not ready yet, but I plan to work on it this week end during the Forever XIII party.

To port it, you just need :
* A function to read keyboard input
* A function to print a char on screen
* A function to read a floppy sector
* A function to write a floppy sector
* A C compiler
No C standard lib is involved : no memcpy, no printf, no strcmp.

There may be some changes needed to the code, mainly hardcoded keycodes and escape sequences to set colors on screen. Nothing that some #defines can't solve.

The limitations are (because of the FAT driver I use) :
* No long file name support
* It is not possible to create/delete/resize files (so you can't create a new blank disk or so)

The current code needs about 8K of memory (code+data).

Ok, weekend is over, and software is mostly ready now.

I think I still have a bug with getting the cluster for a file in a format that the HxC likes.

There are other problems but they are mostly :
* Only related to the thomson platform (making it a bootable disk and such)
* Or, optimizations (not displaying the whole menu each time, and so on)

So, if you want to start porting it, should be ok now.

I'm thinking about tackling this for the Coco (and maybe others), thanks for the links to the subversion repo!

~telengard

Oh, nice, there's even more code to share with my version then, Thomson computers and CoCo have the same CPU