Dears, Did anyone around had anything with these? Since FDD is commonly not used anymore and since there is still around a lot of equipment using it some fine people come with the idea of building a replacement for FDD that would emulate its functioning while the data would be stored on USB pen drive. It is indeed a good idea: I guess that a mass production of the device should be no more than around 20-50 $ while these units are sold for up to 500 US$ (in Poland up to 500 PLN, which is 4 times less). Where that is used? Very often still, in programmable musical instruments and, first of all, in machines used in industry. I am landed now at the National Center for Nuclear Research near Warsaw, Poland. And I was given such a toy, a FDD/USB emulator (EMUF-720F), for installing it in Robofill 200 machine which is used for wire-cutting metal. I am fine with that. After some Internet searching I know already, mostly, how to use it. With one exception: I do not know how to boot the machine from that emulator. Help is to be sincerely appreciated. zb. -- Zbigniew KozioĊ http://nanophysics.pl mobile: +48 507 330 216
Hi Zbigniew - Not familiar with the particular EMUF-720F device you mentioned, but there are many micro-controller based floppy disc emulators, and I use a couple with my older devices. Getting a floppy drive to appear bootable was usually done with jumpers on the circuit board. Is the old (non working?) drive available? How you did it varied by drive manufacturer. Some pictures of drive options are here: http://embeddedsw.net/EMUFDD_Floppy_Hardware_Emulator_Home.html#Jumpering The boot drive is usually DS0, but I have a system that will only boot from DS1, so there's no standard. Keeping old hardware running - especially solid old CNC machinery - is really important. If all else fails, I have sources for most old floppy drives and media, but they are getting rarer and less reliable every year. cheers, Stewart
On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 01:33:58PM +0100, Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
Dears,
Did anyone around had anything with these?
Since FDD is commonly not used anymore and since there is still around a lot of equipment using it some fine people come with the idea of building a replacement for FDD that would emulate its functioning while the data would be stored on USB pen drive. It is indeed a good idea: I guess that a mass production of the device should be no more than around 20-50 $ while these units are sold for up to 500 US$ (in Poland up to 500 PLN, which is 4 times less). Where that is used? Very often still, in programmable musical instruments and, first of all, in machines used in industry. I am landed now at the National Center for Nuclear Research near Warsaw, Poland. And I was given such a toy, a FDD/USB emulator (EMUF-720F), for installing it in Robofill 200 machine which is used for wire-cutting metal. I am fine with that. After some Internet searching I know already, mostly, how to use it. With one exception: I do not know how to boot the machine from that emulator.
Help is to be sincerely appreciated.
I use a floppy emulator with my Amiga. Works great. It actually emulates two floppy drives at once in this case which is handy, and you can store a lot of floppies on an SD card at once. I use this one: http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html#SDCARDFloppyemulator The feature set is quite impressive. -- Len Sorensen
participants (3)
-
Lennart Sorensen -
Stewart C. Russell -
Zbigniew Koziol