On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 20:40 -0600, Jim Leonard wrote: How does that work? From past discussions on this list, the PC parallel port isn't fast enough to sample the bitstream from a floppy drive...

Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Right, it uses actual PC floppy drives connected with a special cable (very simple to wire up) that connects it to the parallel port. Essentially, the parallel port becomes a high-speed floppy controller. It is done this way because the regular floppy controller can't do some of the things that are required to 100% exactly image a diskette (like pass all of the information off the controller). Yes, and the two-drives thing is something that is one of the most clever hacks I've ever seen -- you can't get the floppy controller to pass all bits through to the CPU to write to a hard disk file, but you CAN use a pass-through method of the controller to write them to sectors on a formatted diskette on another drive. When done, the program then writes a FAT to the diskette and assigns a file to where the sectors were written. Seems like a kludge but is actually kind-of brilliant. I should note that, since FDI images are 100% exact bitwise dumps, they aren't exactly easy to read (they're not nice clean formatted-track-and-sector images) so getting them translated back to an actual floppy diskette is not currently possible (since nobody has written the software to do so yet). However, they can be parsed: WinUAE has native support for FDI images and they work fine. I personally verified this by dumping a copy-protected Amiga game disk (on my PC, how strange!) and then mounting and booting off of the .FDI image. Worked perfectly, copy-protection and all. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/