4 Mar
2023
4 Mar
'23
8:06 p.m.
Ok, after banging my head against the wall for awhile this evening it
looks like I have two flashfloppy drives working on my Pro/380. Well
enough to boot from and install 3.2 options.
The keys are these:
1) Use a flat 34 pin ribbon cable with three plugs in a straight line. I
tried using one with the traditional flip, got frustrated at the extra
complexity, and reterminated it as straight through all the way.
2) Set one drive to unit 0 (J2 installed) and the second to unit 1 (J3
installed)
3) This is the kicker: RX50's are Shugart drives. You have to go into
the configuration and set the drives to Shugart. IBMPC doesn't work
properly with the disk ready and disk swap signal, I stumbled on this
when I found that flipping the disk image while it was seeking produced
a brief access. Hah.
4) I set the ff.cfg also to read only to avoid stepping on the images by
accident.
So far it seems to be working, saw both drives in the file manager (I
had built a minimum system with the floppies I had) and now I'm
reformatting the RD53 drive and doing a full install. Should be as
simple as turning the knob and hitting resume.
Thanks to Bjoren for letting me know it kind of worked for him years ago
which gave me the knowledge that it could work. One issue I can see is
that since both "drives" use the same head, stupid software could assume
that since drive 0 was seeked to track 30 then drive 1 should be at
track 30 and thus no need to change tracks. So far I haven't seen this
happen, but we shall see.
Interesting.
CZ