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Usb floppydisk emulator


Seob

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To replace my broken diskdrive inside my philips vg8234 msx2,i bought a usb floppydisk emulator. It can be jumpers as a 720kb 3.5" disk drive. It can also be jumpert as 1.44mb 3.5" , 1.2mb 5 1/4" and 720kb 5 1/4".

 

I now need to make a cable to use it inside the msx2, since that uses a 14 wire cable instead of a 34 one.

When it's finished i will post my findings here.

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Got it working. Had to set a few jumpers. Jumper 3 for setting it into 720Kb 3.5" mode. Jumper 5 for setting the ready signal. And Jumper 6 to get rid off disk offline messages after switching disks. It did work without setting jumper 6, but you had to type in files 2x to read the disk.

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The finished cable. The gnd's that wheren't needed on the 34 pin side i just cut off and put a shrinkwrap around it.

 

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The drive plate had to be altered also. Broke off the old taps that hold the drive in place since they where to narrow. I jut used professional double sided tape to fix the drive onto the plate.

 

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The jumpers that need to be set are unterneath the topcover. You have to unscrew the top to get access to them.

 

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Drive in place and hooked up with a usb thumbstick.

I used the software that is available on the ipcas website: http://www.ipcas.com/support/usb-floppy-emulation-download.html to format the stick into 720Kb diskimages. Then i used the software to write *.dsk files to the different folders.

The only thing i haven't fixed yet is the fact that it tries to autoload the first folder always. I tried to leave this folder empty but then my msx got into a booting loop. I now have a image into this folder that needs a 256Kb msx, so it boots, give a error that i have to little space, and than i can use the system.

Loading a image is easy if there is a autoexec.bas in the selected folder. Just select the folder you want and press reset once. The system preformes a soft reset and starts booting the diskimage.

 

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Nice! I've got a 8235/00 that I multiple times tried to get to read double sided disks, including replacing ROM and extra wires to the motherboard. Since I don't really own many MSX formatted floppy disks, perhaps I should try to repeat your mod, since I believe the floppy drive currently installed will need some further modding to get it to work.

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I also have a nms8250, with working diskdrive. I formatted a disk on the msx, then i put it inside my pc and put a diskimage of a msx game on it. Put it back in the msx and i can load games. But it all depends on the diskimage. Not all images will work.

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