Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

HxC Floppy emulator support for all others Keyboards/Samplers...
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Jeff
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Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by Jeff »

Can you send me the HFE files (zipped please) ? i will have a look to them.

https://hxc2001.com/contactus/

Fabrizio
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Joined: Thu Jan 17, 2013 8:29 pm

Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by Fabrizio »

Hello, I'm new to this forum, I don't own yet a floppy emulator but I'm quite interested as I own several old samplers, including a CASIO FZ-20m.
I've done some research on the CASIOs some time ago and I got some level of understanding on how they work.
Basically the FZF format, from what I got, is a dump of the FZ working RAM memory while a floppy disk has been loaded on the machine itself; the memory is dumped in sysex format via a MIDI cable (or via the parallel interface) and can be directed towards a PC or another FZ hooked on the other side of the cable. On an FZ one can start either a dump or a receive session, so loading and saving RAM dumps is possible either from another FZ or a PC , again via MIDI or parallel cable. I suspect then that FZF is the PC file format that the dump program fzdump (freely available) uses to store the data, so it's not a proper floppy format. It might be possible, however unlikely, to read an FZ1 floppy in a PC by modifying a PC floppy to run at 360 RPM (instead of 300) and re-pinning to a Shugart bus standard, this would require though a low level driver bypassing the Windows access layer to the floppy drive , not sure if the HxC floppy emulator program has this capability.
I'm aware of only one solution which can perform what described above, it's a dedicated ISA or PCI board which allow low level R/W access to the floppy drive called "Catweasel" but it's a bit expensive and it's a bit of a new territory.
On the other hand It could be also possible to set the HxC floppy emulator to support the CASIO drive (360 RPM, Shugart bus, etc...) - install the HxC floppy emulator in the sampler, download the FZF file via midi to the sampler using fzdump and then save, assuming writing is supported, the floppy image from the sampler itself to the SD Card as if you were saving to a floppy; that way one can study the image created on the SD card and be able to come to a way to generate directly a proper floppy image from the FZF file.
Now for the so called "optional software" things get more complicated; that software is loaded as an accessory from the floppy in the FZ but is not part of the memory dump and as such not included in the FZF format. In particular one of the files in the optional software is the one responsible to manage the FZ-20m SCSI interface, which leaves the FZ in a quite unique situation, for what I can tell from memory, where to get the SCSI interface to work you need to have the floppy interface working.
I don't think there's any way to download that "optional software" in an image format rather than trying a low level access to the floppy drive via a tentative adaptation of the FZ floppy to the PC or the "Catweasel" device as described above.

Fabrizio

Jeff
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Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by Jeff »

Hi,

the FZF is now supported the HxC Floppy Emulator software: you can make an floppy image from them.

About the FZ1 disk format, these disks use a 360RPM/500Kbits/s format. So reading them with a PC floppy disk drive is only possible with a KryoFlux or similar device.
Plughugger send me his disk, i read it with a KryoFlux, and the stream was analysed with the HxC Floppy Emulator software.

You can find some ready to use HFE file there :

https://hxc2001.com/download/floppy_driv ... Images.zip

tripbeat
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Joined: Wed Feb 13, 2013 10:38 pm

Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by tripbeat »

hello here,
just bought an old casio fz 1 with 10 mb ram and working orginal floppy, as well some of the library.
somebody can recommend me a floppy drive emulator with sd card/usb flash working fine with the fz1?
i am not a technician but can ask a friend gimmie a help then.
thx

Jeff
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Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by Jeff »

tripbeat wrote:hello here,
just bought an old casio fz 1 with 10 mb ram and working orginal floppy, as well some of the library.
somebody can recommend me a floppy drive emulator with sd card/usb flash working fine with the fz1?
i am not a technician but can ask a friend gimmie a help then.
thx
This one : http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=42

tripbeat
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Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by tripbeat »

thx!

jhulk
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Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by jhulk »

i have a massive library of floppy disks do i just use the hxc raw image to create hfe compliant images of these disks or do i need the kyroflex program

springreverb
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Feb 21, 2013 1:26 pm

Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by springreverb »

Hi,
Is the Casio FZ library in .hfe format anywhere?
I have the 142 that's floating around in .hfe format but that is mainly FZ users with a few Casio banks.

I have the hxc emu working in a FZ20m , superb! a miracle!

not tried saving individual voices yet though, not sure if that is possible.

ahaigh01
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Joined: Wed Jan 29, 2014 9:47 pm

Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by ahaigh01 »

Hi,

Here is the Real Casio library disks, not the user group disks.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/sh847 ... %20FZF.zip

springreverb
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Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by springreverb »

awesome ! thanks so much!

ahaigh01
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Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by ahaigh01 »

Hey SpringReverb,

I should mention that those disks are not .hfe images since you had asked about that in an earlier post, but are .fzf (FZ1 full dump format). I don't currently have a floppy drive emulator or a way to make floppy images. Since I don't have the special high speed cable either, I have been using midi to transmit between the FZ and the PC which takes 12 minutes to send or receive one floppy!

springreverb
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Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by springreverb »

I think they can be converted with hxc?

jhulk
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Joined: Tue Apr 12, 2011 5:44 pm

Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by jhulk »

so i just do a raw floppy dump in hxc and it can just create the hfe file from a fz1 floppy disk

as i have a few 100,s of floppy disks from the hardcore days

swissdoc
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Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by swissdoc »

jhulk wrote:so i just do a raw floppy dump in hxc and it can just create the hfe file from a fz1 floppy disk
You can create .hfe files from .img files created with HxC or for instance Omniflop (if you have compatible drive in your Computer) and/or from .fzf files as to be found at places mentioned in this thread.

Comment on Omniflop:
Back in 2009 I helped Jason Watton to add the 80/2/8x1024 Casio FZ-20M 1280kB format to Omniflop, I used a hp Compaq d530 SFF Computer to scan the format and it still works fine for reading and writing Casio FZ1 disks. The other 80/2/8x1024 Casio FZ-20M HD 1280kB format Jason added based on info from the Buchty site.

swissdoc
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Joined: Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:55 pm

Re: Casio FZ-1 and HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

Post by swissdoc »

Jeff wrote:the FZF is now supported the HxC Floppy Emulator software: you can make an floppy image from them.
Thanks a lot for all this. I am part of the HxC user community for a few days now with my Casio FZ-20M sampler. It works just fine and out of the box.

I have 2 questions/comments:

Support for 2M fzf files:
The .fzf format is supported by HxCFloppyEmulator.exe, so those samples flying around can be converted directly. There is only one issue: in case the .fzf file has data for more than one disk, there is no way to create the second disk from the .fzf file. At least I was not able to get it done. This impacts i.e. the data from casio070.fzf or Solo Tenor Sax 2M Byte.fzf

I have 3 packs of original Casio Sample Disks, which I could read with Omniflop on a hp Compaq d530 SFF Computer to .img format. In case of 2M samples it is just about loading disk 1 and then disk 2 as expected. It would be great if this was natively supported by HxCFloppyEmulator.exe

Support for .fzb and .fzv files:
While the .fzf covers a whole disk, .fzb and .fzv are covering banks and voices. Since there are lots of this samples available from the Swedish Users Club public domain FZ sound disks, support for those file type would be great. I was able to convert .fzb and .fzv files by renaming them to .fzf, but there is strange pitch modulation going on by the LFO, which cannot be deactivated on the sampler. The LFO to pitch ammount has no influence, only the LFO rate can be set to 000 to get rid of the effect. Beside that, the data is transfered fine.

There can be 2M .fzb and .fzv files as well, so they would need to be split across disks as well

It would be pretty cool, if those features could be added!

Here you find the Swedish Users Club public domain FZ sound disks:

Casio FZ Public Domain Samples CD 1:
http://www.swissdoc.de/download/casio/C ... %20CD1.rar
http://www.swissdoc.de/download/casio/contents1.txt

Casio FZ Public Domain Samples CD 2:
http://www.swissdoc.de/download/casio/C ... %20CD2.rar
http://www.swissdoc.de/download/casio/contents2.txt

This is an ISO image with quite an exhaustive collection of data about the FZ1:
http://www.swissdoc.de/download/casio/Casio%20FZ1.rar

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