[Coco] Software testing for FDC emulator

[Darren A]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 8:38 PM, Arthur Flexser  wrote:
>
> One thing I'm not clear on about the FDC emulator:
>
> Is this something that reads a real protected CoCo floppy under a CoCo
> emulator running on a Windows machine that has a floppy drive?  Or has the
> CoCo floppy been somehow transformed into a data file that mimics
> its nonstandard track structure, and that is what the FDC emulator uses as
> its input?  If the latter, how was the transformation accomplished?
>

---

My FDC emulator is yet another piece of hardware that plugs into the
CoCo's cartridge port or an MPI.  It appears as a standard floppy disk
controller to the CoCo, but will typically interface with a server on
a separate PC instead of a real floppy drive.  The server must support
a more robust disk image format (DMK being the obvious choice) in
order to deal with copy-protected software and non-standard disk
formats.

In addition to emulating a floppy disk controller, the device can also
be used to download ROM pak images from a server and execute them with
read-only access to the code.

I know Steve Bjork has announced a similar project which sounds a
little more advanced than mine.  I've been working on my design (when
I can find the spare time) for about two years now, so I plan on
seeing it through to completion.  It's been quite challenging and also
a lot of fun.

Darren