[Coco] Software testing for FDC emulator

[Steve Bjork]

I'm not sure about other FDC emulators, but my unit will work any 
software that design to talk to the Western Digital controller used on 
the CoCo.  It will translate the CoCo I/O lines to the FDC and feed back 
the data from the SD card.  This will looks and feels just like there is 
a WD Floppy disk control and floppy drive contacted to the coco.

The only problem will be emulating non-standard floppy formats.  But all 
standard and non-standard formats that I've use in the past are working 
so far.  My plan is to use a re-programmable micro-controller so it can 
be updated in the field to handle unknown formats as they are found.

Since we don't have spinning disk there are not real timing issues.   
(Well there is the write speed limit, but that's easy to work around.)

Let me state that my design is not ready for market.  (Not even ready to 
show as a demo.)  It great that there are other designs being worked 
on.  If the other designs are better or make it to market fast, so much 
the better for the CoCo community.

While I will do my best in my design, but I hope Darren's design is 
better than mine.  After all, we want the best for the CoCo.

Steve Bjork


On 4/24/2011 6:25 PM, Roger Taylor wrote:
> Everyone already knows that these virtual drive systems don't fully 
> emulate the floppy controller hardware but what the average user 
> accomplishes with an FDC can be done using these systems.  An FDC is 
> both the controller and the ROM working together.  When you say mostly 
> games, it almost sounds like you're saying most games won't work under 
> CoCoNet.  Let me be the second or third person to reiterate that many, 
> many, games and apps have proven to load and run just fine under 
> CoCoNet's various drive systems.
>
> As for Darren's FDC emulation concept - we chatted about it over two 
> years ago and I agree that it's brilliant.
>