5 Mar
2023
5 Mar
'23
5:28 a.m.
Minor tangent:
decades ago, very briefly, several manufacturers, such as Canon,
introduced "dual" drives, that were the size of a regular floppy drive,
but with two slots, with two sets of heads, etc., for people who wanted
two floppy drives.
There were two variations, differentiated mostly, but not entirely by
price. One version had one head positioner, and the heads of both drives
would be on the same cylinder.
The other variation had independent head positioners.
Although MOST uses would prefer the independent positioners, the one that
shared a positioner, IFF the software understood, could copy disks much
faster. If the software did not understand, then it was extremely slow,
having to recalibrate for every track seek.
Before long, however, those drives were replaced by dual drives that
consisted of a 5.25" drive and a 3.5" drive, because, by that time people
were less interested in having a pair of drives than they were in haveing
both types.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
On Sat, 4 Mar 2023, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:
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