[cctalk] Re: emulating floppies [was: Paper tape in casettes...]

On Feb 27, 2024, at 15:43, Wayne S &lt;wayne.sudol(a)hotmail.com&gt; wrote: I know you do this for a living and are good at it. Most of us don’t do it as a living but have piles of floppies that we want to recover cheaply using an existing method. Grease, cat and other wezels, are fine but you have to do more work to get usable stuff, unless your floppies are all c64 😀 The applesauce just seems further along than the others. Just my opinion. Sent from my iPhone > On Feb 27, 2024, at 15:33, CAREY SCHUG via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: > > I knew most of this, which is why emulating the floppy controller should be easier. > > applesauce is platform specific (ok, ANY floppy emulation will be platform specific for apple) > > I thought the applesauce page said it was not yet available for standard shugart style as in trs-80, s-100... > > greaseweasel is platform specific. the color coco is not yet available in the USA, needing shipping from Europe, which in my experience is not cheap. not even promised for trs80 1/3/4 or s-100. and are the parts cheap? dunno. > > did not know about gcr/mfm on same floppy...if you respond, please mention who does that. gaak, I don't even > recognize "gcr" at this point. I remember mfm and something else. mfm was single density, right? was gcr > double density? does not seem familiar, but certainly there was a double density encoding scheme that the > device attached to the floppy cable would have to recognize. > > I had forgotten that atari? commodore? changed speed, though I remember I knew that before. > > <pre>--Carey</pre> > >>> On 02/27/2024 5:18 PM CST Wayne S via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: >> >> >> The “support” channel has the most info on the applesause. >> >> >> Sent from my iPhone >> >>> On Feb 27, 2024, at 15:12, Wayne S &lt;wayne.sudol(a)hotmail.com&gt; wrote: >> >>  Chuck, not to disagree much, because you are an expert, but there’s more to decoding floppies than just reading them. Some floppies have tracks that are recorded at different speeds. Some have tracks that use different modulation gcr on some and mfm on others. A lot of floppies have different skew. The applesauce tries to handle these problems and give you a readable file. It’s mostly in the software. >> >> I tried to send the discord link but don’t know if it got thru so here it is again >> >> https://discord.gg/njetE8zU >> >> Wayne >> >> >> Sent from my iPhone >> >>> On Feb 27, 2024, at 15:02, Chuck Guzis via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: >> >> On 2/27/24 14:42, Wayne S via cctalk wrote: >> Take a look at the Applesauce. >> It hooks up to a lot of different floppy drives and records and decodes the flux. >> Version2 of the hardware is being sourced and should be available in a few months. >> >> Good grief, there are more of these things floating around than one can >> shake a stick at. The Greasweazel is perhaps the cheapest, using a $3 >> ($1.30 or so from Aliexpress) STM32F103 "Blue Pill" board. >> >> It's almost trivial doing this if you don't need the "eye candy". >> Basically you run a timer in capture mode, with capture triggered by an >> edge on the drive's "read data" line. >> >> Modern MCUs don't even break a sweat doing this. >> >> It's nice seeing the proliferation after many years of harping on the >> subject... >> >> --Chuck