USB floppy drive with ROOL on Pi?

I have a bunch of old original 3.5" disks for the Archimedes. I realise that these are probably 26-bit applications, but perhaps a USB disk drive would work with an emulator as well as modern ROOL? There are some interesting programs there (including, I think, some rare Swedish localisations). In particular it would be fun to play Zarch again, for which I have the original disk. From what I understand it has some aggressive copy protection, which means it has to be run from the original floppy, but I’m not sure how well it would work with the hardware. Does anyone have experience with this.

(A further problem is of course, that the disks haven’t been used in 15-20 years, so I don’t know if they still work. I have an Archimedes, but no scree for it, so I haven’t been able to test them…)

I have a bunch of old original 3.5" disks for the Archimedes. I realise that these are probably 26-bit applications, but perhaps a USB disk drive would work with an emulator as well as modern ROOL?

USB floppy drive – problematic I believe. Reading the Acorn formats involves driving the hardware differently than it is hardwired to do IIRC.

Old games – you need to look at ADFFS
There’s a possibility you have discs for games and variants that Jon doesn’t have.

That’s a shame… That means, that, even though I have the disk, I’ll have to find it (semi?) illegally somewhere on the internet. Oh well. Maybe it’s less hassle finding a screen for the Archie..?

Thanks for the tip about JASPP though! I’ll have a look at the disks, to see if there is anything interesting for JASPP. Without a floppy reader, I guess it will be difficult to know if there is anything worth saving, however.

Someone on this site started do a Pic USB interface to read a Acorn floppy drive.

DOS floppy’s can be read by using a USB floppy drive.

Zarch can be made to run in a Window on a 32bit machine – goes quick.

You could get an old Risc PC or Iynoix which have native floppy drives, or find someone who has one that would be willing to read the discs for you.

Unfortunately I’ve just sold my Iyonix, so I can’t help. The last thing I did was check to see what was on the last half a dozen floppies I have. Although I’m sure when I finally get around to clearing out the cupboards, I’m bound to find more. I’m know there is a case of 5.25" ADFS discs from the BBC Master around hear somewhere.

That’s a shame… That means, that, even though I have the disk, I’ll have to find it (semi?) illegally somewhere on the internet. Oh well. Maybe it’s less hassle finding a screen for the Archie..?

I don’t believe there is anything illegal (or even semi-legal) about the items that Jon has worked on.
From his comments sometimes getting the legal OK from the original rights holders has been more time consuming than some of the patching for use on the new systems.

Anyone recall the URL of the site that doing the PIC interface project for Acorn floppy on USB?

Anyone recall the URL of the site that doing the PIC interface project for Acorn floppy on USB?

I only remember seeing it, but can’t remember where I saved the link…

Other projects of interest that (some only theoretically) allow imaging of RISC OS floppies are: ADFFS (running on old Acorn hardware with real floppies, like Archimedes up to A7000/Risc PC), OmniFlop (running on a PC with a real floppy, i.e. anything up to Windows XP normally), Slamy’s STM32 Floppy Controller, David Given’s FluxEngine, the commercial KryoFlux (in conjunction with Daniel Jameson’s Kryo2APD utility), Keir Fraser’s Greaseweazle..

I don’t believe there is anything illegal (or even semi-legal) about the items that Jon has worked on.
From his comments sometimes getting the legal OK from the original rights holders has been more time consuming than some of the patching for use on the new systems.

No, I gather that, but it seems – though I may be wrong – that Zarch is not among the titles for which he has approval, unfortunately. At least I can’t seem to find it.

You can use Virtual Acorn on a PC to read original format floppy discs.

You can use Virtual Acorn on a PC to read original format floppy discs.

This may not be enough to deal with aggressive copy protection. Some of it did tricks like hiding keys in mapped-out sectors. It requires direct access to the disc controller hardware.

You can use Virtual Acorn on a PC to read original format floppy discs.

Surely this is only true if the floppy drive is not connected by USB?
Fairly rare now a days.

Has anyone come across the pattern/format of a 3.5 floppy?

80 rings each side split up into sectors?

Was there a hole in the floppy to indicate start of the ring/cylinder/track or was there a electronic marker put on before the sectors?

Was the layout of the disk starting in the center +40 and -40?

There’s some information at PRM 2-200, and a diagram of the interleaved track numbering used for E format (800K) discs.

It seems that the start of track can indicated both ways; but it says the magnetic mark is optional, and doesn’t tell you when it would or wouldn’t be there!! I would imagine that the “mechanical start” is given by the second offset hole in the metal thingy in the middle.

I don’t know how the drive grabs the disc though…how does it get the metal thingy in the disc and the turny bit in the drive to line up?? Does it stick something in both bits?

There are soft sectored and hard sectored floppy discs. Hard sectored discs have a number of holes at approx the sector spacing and were not common even forty years ago.

A soft sectored disc has a single hole and when a track is being formatted, the whole track is written just after the hole is ‘seen’. The data used for the contents of the track use a few special bytes which are interpreted by the disc controller chip as to fiddle with the clock pulse making the byte recognisable as ‘special’ to mark the start of the track, the sector ID and the data. Writing a sector will then step the head until it reads the correct track number, reading the data until it sees the correct sector number, wait for a prescribed interval and then write the sector data to overwrite what was there before. There are dummy bytes between each item to make sure a sector write does not overwrite an adjacent sector. The arrangement of sectors within a track are intended so that by the time a particular sector has been read and stored in memory, the next sector is just about to arrive at the read head. This is a compromise as reading and writing take different times. So arrangements might be 1,2,3,4 or 1,4,7,10 etc. whichever works best.

The read/write head on an 80 track drive is narrower than on a 35 or 40 track drive so a disc prepared on a 40 track drive might become unreliable on an 80 track drive. Also writing at double density on a single density disc or writing at single density on a disc that had been written to at double density can be problematic. Then ‘high density’ was introduced and the heads on earlier drives no longer had sufficient magnetic power to work reliably. Most of my floppy discs are now unreliable not so much because the medium itself was flawed but because of the issues just mentioned (AFAIK).

As if that wasn’t enough, there were differences between systems in sector size (128 or 256 or 512 bytes) as well as sector numbering (is the first sector zero or one). Copy protection might use deliberately wrong CRC values for data, or a sector number greater than the number of sectors per track or a track 81 as such things were easy to do when the disc was being formatted.

You can use Virtual Acorn on a PC to read original format floppy discs.

Surely this is only true if the floppy drive is not connected by USB?
Fairly rare now a days.

I keep forgetting that my Windows XP PC is now really a museum article. But it does everything I need from a PC. I rarely use the new one (Windows7 with no floppy disc!)

Thanks for the info about floppy’s.

Since they came after tape – I wonder if they took a cylinder and stuck several strips of tape around it :-)

Would on tape – the address be first and followed by bytes and then checksums?

Is there a recommended USB floppy drive that will work with RISC OS?

Any for sale from RISC OS supplier’s?

Would a ‘USB On the go’ cable work between a Android phone and a USB stick?

Is there a recommended USB floppy drive that will work with RISC OS?

No.

Any for sale from RISC OS supplier’s?

No.

Would a ‘USB On the go’ cable work between a Android phone and a USB stick?

Yes, I’ve got one and had it working with my phone (OnePlus 3T).

Would a ‘USB On the go’ cable work between a Android phone and a USB stick?

Depends upon the phone. Decent ones can do it, budget ones maybe not.

Was your phone supplied with an OTG cable or dongle?

Dongle??

Was a time when I could plug the mobile into the Iyonix and copy files over – but seems not to work anymore – perhaps it was a different phone :-(

Dongle??

Little one (USB2) came with my phone. Bigger one (USB3) came from Amazon. They’re both USB-C to USB-A socket.
Tested on my S9 with keyboard, mouse, and various FAT32 devices. Does not run spinning rust (not enough power to spin up the drive).

Was a time when I could plug the mobile into the Iyonix and copy files over – but seems not to work anymore – perhaps it was a different phone :-(

I used to do that but when it stopped working I found a better solution that works with any Android phone.
if you install ES Explorer (its a file manager) it has an Network option – Remote Manager which allows access to the phone from FTPc. I mainly use it to download photos, but you can access anything you want read write.

+1 for ES Explorer, but make sure you get an older version. Mine is 3.2.4.1, I can send you an apk if you’re interested.

Later versions (don’t know when) started to hijack the lock screen with adverts, and it was finally booted off the app store because of clickfraud. Seriously, never have I seen a decent app fail so hard.
The one currently there with that name is by a different company, not the same thing, and reviews suggest that it is full of intrusive advertising.

I, however, used the file explorer in reverse, running Samba on the Pi and using network connections to access it (and the PC).

Unfortunately ES Explorer was bought from its original author and turned it to malware. It’s happening to more and more popular older android apps, so watch out for changes in ownership or the apps suddenly changing their behaviour.

Reasons #1-4 of why I rarely update my apps.

1. They broke it
2. Things that were free now cost money
3. Covered in advertising
4. Trojan for malware

And since there’s no official rollback mechanism, if you didn’t back up the apk you are stuck.

Oh, and a plague on the houses of those who bake in forced updates (app tells you to update and then quits) especially when the update doesn’t work.