raimund Posted January 16, 2005 Share Posted January 16, 2005 Hi, I'm using an 800XL that I equipped with an SIO2PC board with a linux box as virtual floppy drive/disk image server. This works so well that I started wondering if there are similar solutions for the Atari ST? For those not familiar with SIO2PC: SIO2PC consists of two components: an Adapter cable that is plugged into the 800XL's floppy connector and in the serial port of the PC. The second component is a server software on the PC side provides access to disk images stored on the PC HDD and listens for floppy accesses on the cable. In case of a floppy access (booting, for instance), the software serves the data from the image to the cable. What's so good about it? a) its simple. Not much hardware needed: for the Atari 800XL the only hardware needed is a cable, an IC, a resistor, a diode and a capacitor. b) it's cheap. c) it's transparent. Software that requires a floppy boot (sometimes that seems to be necessary for some custom made file-systems to prevent copying) will work just as good as ordinary floppys with standard filesystems. d) in case of the 800XL it's 3 times faster than a real floppy. e) no floppy disks anymore. I also have a 1040STfm. My current way of running that machine is to copy .st and .msa disk images with a program called "stdisk" back to floppy on a Windows PC (couldn't find such software for Linux). That takes quite long, because each floppy first needs a sticker acreoos the HDD hole to make it appear like a 720K disk, then it's being formatted (about 20-30% of the floppies turn out to be broken during this phase) and afterwards the image gets copied. The next step is to carry the disk over to my ST, stuff it in and wait until its content is loaded... Compared with the 800XL this is a pain in the behind. A similar solution for the Atari ST should make comparably expensive IDE/SCSI harddrive solutions unnecessary. If anything similar is around and I didn't notice: could someone point it out to me? If nothing of this type is around yet, maybe there is interest among some of you folks to develop a SIO2PC solution for the ST. I'd definitely be interested to contribute the Linux side of things... Cheers, Raimund Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+rdemming Posted January 16, 2005 Share Posted January 16, 2005 I've been wanting such system too for the ST. On the 8-bit machines the hardware is quite simple since it is very similar to a standard RS-232. The disk controller logic is in the diskdrive itself and is communicating over a serial connection with the computer. On the ST this is not so simple since all the logic to access a floppy drive is in the ST. The signals send over to the floppy drive are raw controller signals like "motor on", "side select", "step", "step direction" and raw serial data streams to read and write data. So the interface hardware with the PC will be much more complicated. I don't think there is a hardware port on the PC that can handle those signal (signal or speed wise), thus you will probably end up with some hardware with a microcontroller and memory buffer for the floppy data, Any other solution that bypasses the ST's floppy controller would need additional software on the ST side and would not work with a lot of games and demos. I think it will be to complicated for a hobby project although I would like to be proven wrong. Robert Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tickled_Pink Posted January 16, 2005 Share Posted January 16, 2005 Any reason why it has to be by serial comms? What about hooking things up through the parallel ports on the two machines? It's just data transmission, after all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raimund Posted January 17, 2005 Author Share Posted January 17, 2005 On the ST this is not so simple since all the logic to access a floppy drive is in the ST. The signals send over to the floppy drive are raw controller signals like "motor on", "side select", "step", "step direction" and raw serial data streams to read and write data. So the interface hardware with the PC will be much more complicated. I don't think there is a hardware port on the PC that can handle those signal (signal or speed wise), thus you will probably end up with some hardware with a microcontroller and memory buffer for the floppy data, Should be possible to write some server software that interprets these signals and carries them out on the disk images. Are these commands transferred into the floppy drive as n bit parallel signals or as serial? The accesses to the floppy appear quite slow. And I dont think it's really necessary to use RS232. Shouldn't USB1.1 with it's 12 MBits/s be sufficient, even if commands and data are transferred to the floppy in parallel and would need to be serialized? Correct me if I'm wrong: it appears to me that the ST would need to be equipped with an extra board that would replace the floppy drive. The board would have to turn the data to the floppy into a serial data stream. Once that is achieved it should be possible to use USB as method to actually transport the data to the Linux box. The Linux box would need a kernel module that could get loaded automatically once the ST would be plugged in (custom set vendorID/deviceID), similar to webcams and the like. The kernel module should get rid of the USB data wrapping and provide the data stream as it was prepared on the ST to some user space application that interprets commands and reads/writes data. Cheers, Raimund Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+rdemming Posted January 22, 2005 Share Posted January 22, 2005 Any reason why it has to be by serial comms? What about hooking things up through the parallel ports on the two machines? You can use use almost every port for datatransfer. I believe ghostlink supports serial but PARCP supports parallel connections to a PC. The problem with these kind of solutions is that it needs additional software on the ST. And most games/demos don't like that. Besides these programs allows you to access files on the PC harddisk but do not support disk images. And since a lot of games/demos use boot disk (e.g. disks without a file system (no FAT)) they will not work. Thus these solutions are mainly used to transfer files between ST/PC and not directly run programs stored on a PC harddisk. To load & run ST games/demos from a PC you need a solution that does not need additional software on the ST. Thus you need some hardware/PC software that connects to the floppy connector of a ST. Robert Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+rdemming Posted January 22, 2005 Share Posted January 22, 2005 Are these commands transferred into the floppy drive as n bit parallel signals or as serial? Floppy data transfer is a raw serial stream. Thus including marker bytes, gap bytes, and CRC bytes. Correct me if I'm wrong: it appears to me that the ST would need to be equipped with an extra board that would replace the floppy drive.. Yes, I think that would be the way to go. But the board could also be pluged in the external floppy port. A switch could be made inside the ST to swap the internal and external drives. The board should contain all the logic to emulate a floppy and use USB for example to retrieve the data from a PC. Not an easy solution. Robert Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted January 24, 2005 Share Posted January 24, 2005 What the ST *really* needs is a solution like the SVD. Check it out! http://www.rothfus.com/SVD/index.htm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt Vendel Posted January 28, 2005 Share Posted January 28, 2005 I'm using a program called STmaster.prg and and pcslave.exe with a stock null modem cable. The ST side has weird baud rate settings above 38400 which don't correspond with the PC side (why, I don't know...) so 38.4K is the max I've gotten it to work at. It allows you to specify which drive on your PC you want the ST to access, even a floppy drive or CD-rom and then you can copy things to/form the PC drive. Its slooooooooooow, but it works. Curt stmaster.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ijor Posted March 18, 2005 Share Posted March 18, 2005 It is possible to make a SIO2PC for the ST, but there are some complications. It is not too difficult. I’d say that emulating the MFM signal is even easier than emulating the SIO protocol. The main problem is the speed. SIO works at 19,200 bps, or at maximum around 57,600 with a SIO2PC cable. But the MFM signal has a 250,000 bps, and you can’t use the serial port for the serialization because the signal is not async. A standard parallel port doesn’t work that fast. And even if it would, you can’t afford that rate under a multitasking OS. So you have to use an external device, which could be inside the ST if you want, or even a custom PCI card. It would probably be micro-controller based it could possible done with a FPGA. You would need quite some memory though, because contrary to SIO, the ST computer will not wait and you can’t afford any interrupt/CPU latency. The amount of memory would depend on how intelligent the device would be (a dumber device will need the MFM encoding/decoding done at the PC). And it would also depend if you want to “emulate” standard disks only or you also want copy protected ones. As somebody said, you will need a minimum hardware mod in the ST to disable the internal drive. Only earlier ST models without an internal drive could use a plug-in solution. My guess is that eventually we’ll see something like this. Eventually all floppy drives will stop working and won’t be manufactured anymore. But computers will probably last longer, and could also be cloned. Then everybody will want a floppy drive emulator. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wood_jl Posted April 11, 2009 Share Posted April 11, 2009 Old thread....HELLO!!! I was just wondering if there has ever been any more development on this front. Something like this would make using the ST a whole lot more practical for many folks. SIO2PC is marvelous for the A8. The USB version is just over-the-top successful. I guess a little external interface/controller deal to from USB 2.0 to ST floppy port (and corresponding PC software) is a whole lot more difficult (and thereby expensive and impractical) to implement than a casual layman user can fathom. Perhaps there would be no market after all the development. Sure would be cool, though. But I guess the emulator is as good as we'll see! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thorsten Günther Posted April 11, 2009 Share Posted April 11, 2009 Old thread....HELLO!!! I was just wondering if there has ever been any more development on this front. Something like this would make using the ST a whole lot more practical for many folks. SIO2PC is marvelous for the A8. The USB version is just over-the-top successful. I guess a little external interface/controller deal to from USB 2.0 to ST floppy port (and corresponding PC software) is a whole lot more difficult (and thereby expensive and impractical) to implement than a casual layman user can fathom. Perhaps there would be no market after all the development. Sure would be cool, though. But I guess the emulator is as good as we'll see! As I see it, the new UltraSatan Disk pretty much eliminates the need for a floppy drive emulator. Just buy one and a copy of HDDRIVER and you can transfer 512 megs of software to the ST at an instant, using a cheap SD card. Thorsten Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+rdemming Posted April 14, 2009 Share Posted April 14, 2009 (edited) As I see it, the new UltraSatan Disk pretty much eliminates the need for a floppy drive emulator. Just buy one and a copy of HDDRIVER and you can transfer 512 megs of software to the ST at an instant, using a cheap SD card. SatanDisk and UltraSatan are great devices but they are harddisk replacements and not floppy replacements. Many games/demo run only from floppy and can't be put and run from a harddisk device (like UltraSatan) unless they are hacked/modified to run from harddisk. The guys from D-Bug, Klapauzius and P.Putnik are working hard to make lots of games runnable from harddisk but lots of games/demos are still not converted. So for those you still need a floppy drive emulator. Luckilly there is floppy emulator that works for various computers like Amiga and Atari ST: HxC Floppy Emulator HxC Floppy Emulator forum Look in the forum for Peter Sieg. He made a few more boards in february. Maybe he still have some left. Easiest is to replace the internal floppy with this board but it can be attached to external floppy port as well if you make the right cable. But to make the external drive act as drive A so you can boot from it, you will need to add a drive A<>B exchange switch to the ST as well. Robert Edited April 14, 2009 by rdemming Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted April 14, 2009 Share Posted April 14, 2009 Look in the forum for Peter Sieg. He made a few more boards in february. Maybe he still have some left. Already done, he has none left. Which sucks mightily. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wood_jl Posted April 15, 2009 Share Posted April 15, 2009 How come nobody here mentioned the "HxC Floppy Emulator" http://www.torlus.com/floppy/ This looks really cool! Appears to be compatible with the Amiga as well. This is ***EXACTLY*** the kind of thing I was thinking of - (I think) which is kinda like SIO2PC for 8-bit. I'd really like to hear some testimonials from people who've used it, but I likely already would have if there are any such folks. I'm guessing this is a new thing. Any thoughts? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted April 15, 2009 Share Posted April 15, 2009 How come nobody here mentioned the "HxC Floppy Emulator" It just was mentioned above. And it's an amazingly cool device. Unfortunately you can't actually buy it anywhere, so that's a problem to say the least. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mimo Posted April 15, 2009 Share Posted April 15, 2009 How come nobody here mentioned the "HxC Floppy Emulator" It just was mentioned above. And it's an amazingly cool device. Unfortunately you can't actually buy it anywhere, so that's a problem to say the least. It looks to my untrained eye that all the information is available ie schematics etc. Could we get someone to make some from the Atari scene? Unfortunately I don't know enough about this stuff, but maybe a smallish run of 20 or so may be feasible? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wood_jl Posted April 17, 2009 Share Posted April 17, 2009 How come nobody here mentioned the "HxC Floppy Emulator" It just was mentioned above. And it's an amazingly cool device. Unfortunately you can't actually buy it anywhere, so that's a problem to say the least. That web page (link above) for the HxC folks boasts that "over 100" were shipped in 2008. I'm surprised that with the combined interest in the ST and Amiga computers, this isn't more popular. A few days ago I was just wishing something like this WAS EVEN CREATED. Now I see it has been, but it's just not popular! I guess I'm just waaaaay overestimating the size of the 16-bit computer enthusiasts, as well as overestimating their interest in something like this. I did notice that the HxC web page doesn't say a thing about HOW to order one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wood_jl Posted April 17, 2009 Share Posted April 17, 2009 I wonder if this "floppy drive emulator" (on ebay) would work with an ST. The item is in Saigon, by a seller with ZERO reputation...don't think I'll be bidding. But take a look: http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-Floppy-Drive-Emula...1QQcmdZViewItem I think it's more for industrual machines that used floppies. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Wolfe Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 How come nobody here mentioned the "HxC Floppy Emulator" http://www.torlus.com/floppy/ This looks really cool! Appears to be compatible with the Amiga as well. This is ***EXACTLY*** the kind of thing I was thinking of - (I think) which is kinda like SIO2PC for 8-bit. I'd really like to hear some testimonials from people who've used it, but I likely already would have if there are any such folks. I'm guessing this is a new thing. Any thoughts? this thing is INCREDIBLE and works on anything that has a 3.5 floppy drive. what a boon to musicians with synths and samplers and all sorts of classic computers... amazing. I MUST have one... but where do we buy them?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 but where do we buy them?? That's the problem, you can't. Nobody is making them for sale. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mimo Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 I have asked if there are plans to build any more, or if there are any documents available to get the PCBs built. Other than that we need someone in the Atari Scene to get the schematic converted to a PCB and see where we go from there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wood_jl Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 I have asked if there are plans to build any more, or if there are any documents available to get the PCBs built.Other than that we need someone in the Atari Scene to get the schematic converted to a PCB and see where we go from there. I can't believe the Amiga crowd isn't "down" with this thing. Perhaps if *both* the ST and Amiga enthusiasts could somehow band together - in awareness of this thing as well as form a market - then the demand would be there for production of a few more. It's just amazing that it IS NOT. Such a device would be truly remarkable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Wolfe Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 this is the reply I got from "greg" after I wrote asking about the device: Hi, Well there is no official "production" for the emulator. A German guy has already made many PCB batchs, and have sold them (bare PCBs, PCBs w/ programmed CPLD, or fully assembled ones). You can register to the forum : http://torlus.com/floppy/forum/ and ask your questions here. Look for posts from "petersieg". Best regards, Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 Very interesting - this would be a nice addition to the Ultrasatan. Stephen Anderson Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikro Posted May 29, 2009 Share Posted May 29, 2009 but where do we buy them?? That's the problem, you can't. Nobody is making them for sale. yet Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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