All floppy formats for all machines?

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ruben_balea
Posts: 191
Joined: Mon 08 May, 2017 11:24 pm
Location: Spain

All floppy formats for all machines?

Post by ruben_balea »

I'm pretty sure most users would appreciate an option to select floppy disc controller on all machines as we can do now with the hard disc.

At least there's one driver called "2M-XBIOS" to make this posible without the need of BIOS support when the controller supports the higher data rate of the bigger drives. Hence the need to select a fast controller on the machines with a slow one...
Many users of real PC/XT machines are using this driver and a cheap 16 Bit Multi I/O card from the early 90's on a 8 Bit slot because the 16 Bit portion is usually needed only for the IDE controller.

And of course there were more expensive cards on the market to add 2 or 4 floppy drives to any PC/XT with BIOS extensions to support 360KB, 720KB, 1.2MB and 1.44MB but for sure with copyrighted BIOSes, thus not available to everybody if emulated.

:idea: But there's a modern and open source card created by Sergey Kiselev: http://www.malinov.com/Home/sergeys-pro ... c-and-uart
This card is much like a XT-IDE for floppies, has open source BIOS, supports drives up to 2.88MB and it's based on a standard 82077AA controller so nothing new needs to be emulated.
I do think that more work will be needed to add the option to select between integrated and optional FDC controller than to emulate this card... And with "emulate" I mean just making its BIOS loading and working fine in PCem.

:?: Isn't anyone encouraged to try it? ;)

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EluanCM
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Re: All floppy formats for all machines?

Post by EluanCM »

I've built this card (along with all the other cards by him.)

The BIOS is for computers which do not know about the enhanced features present in newer floppy disk controllers, so all you should do is load the BIOS and probably call some functions to set the FDC capabilities in the model you want (see fdc.h)
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ruben_balea
Posts: 191
Joined: Mon 08 May, 2017 11:24 pm
Location: Spain

Re: All floppy formats for all machines?

Post by ruben_balea »

Well, I can realize what may be needed but I don't have enough c/c++ skills to do it myself :oops:
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