2 Mar
2023
2 Mar
'23
3:52 p.m.
Chris,
I, too, tried a similar thing.
It mostly worked until there was a need to switch quickly between the
two drives (booting the diagnostics, for example). Then it worked
strangely.
What I believe may be going on is that the Pro is relying on the fact
that, although there appear to be 2 drives attached, they are using the
same head positioning -- they seek in parallel.
I thought about hacking the Flashfloppy code to pay attention to the
drive select and allow a single Gotek to emulate both drives (and take
into account the parallel seeking), but I just ended up using a real
RX50 to boot diagnostics and that was good enough at the time. The big
problem is that the Flashfloppy would need to have 2 disk images mounted
at once. There's a problem of limited RAM in the Flashfloppy, but
there's also a problem of the UI which is really set up for only a
single image.
--Bjoren
On 3/2/2023 3:25 PM, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:
> Seems like it should be simple, but it is not.
>
> I have a pair of Goteks with the Flaashfloppy code and each one has a
> USB with 400k RX50 images on it. Both are set to drive 2, and a
> standard 40 pin floppy crossover cable allows me to emulate a pair of
> drives.
>
> Now, I want to replace the RX50 drive on my Pro/380 with this setup to
> allow it to install POS. However it does not work, the Pro fails
> startup with an error on the floppy controller board, and so far it
> looks like POS can't see the disks.
>
> So what is the difference between an RX50 and a pair of 5.25 drives,
> and is it possible for Flashfloppy to emulate whatever oddness is in a
> true rx50?
>
> CZ