SCSISoftUSB

I am using a previous issue of SCSISoftUSB to access PC format (1.44Mb) floppy disks on a USB floppy drive with RO5 on a Rpi4b.
It works but does cause some issues with other programs and parts of RO5 so has to be used in isolation and then the machine rebooted when done.
I currently have v 0.25 (13 Jul 2018) and know that a v0.28 from 18 May 2020 exists but can’t find where to download it from.
Have found the source file on the ROOL site but have no idea how to make that into a usable binary.

Can someone please provide me to a link to download the most recent version (sure it buried in these forum somewhere).
thanks

What are the issues?

Well running 5.31H (21 Jul 2024) on a Rpi4b4GB and after using SCSISoftUSB 0.25 to access files on a USB floppy drive (PC formatted 1.44mb), which works OK, other programs have issues – eg MP3 and Audio players no longer work – no sound is played etc. Was hoping to find a download of the more recent version to see if some of the issues resolved themselves.
Would like to load SCSISoftUSB as a module in Boot at startup but at present it is a load as needed as seems to conflict with other things.

Other module upgrades have made a difference with the newer RO Rom.
Eg ADFFS 2.83 had overscan issues with RO5.31 in that games would not work but upgrading to ADFFS 2.84beta has largely resolved these issues. Similarly upgrading Fat32Fs from v1.55 to v1.64 (10 Apr 2024) has improved reliability a lot (can read and write to a 32GB Verbatim Surestore USB 3.2 Gen 1 drive OK, although still have issues with a 128GB Sandisk Ultra USB 3.0 not being able to be recognised)

Was the floppy ungrade passed on to the later modules – some people spatter their tea when floppies are referred to.

Colin, I think we’re way beyond being clueless teenagers that would also giggle at the name of one of the planets…

Teenagers? That’s more like five-year-olds…(I have a grandson that age. I know…)

Floppy access is still useful for various file recovery exercises. I use a USB floppy drive on a PC but is also nice to be able to use it on modern RISC OS – apart from magazine and software disks most of my floppies were PC formatted for use/interchanging with other machines back in the day. Yes it would be nice to use a USB floppy drive to read Acorn formatted floppies too.
A few years ago I even bought an old mac to recover some files off DD mac floppies and then transfer them to a PC, then re-sold the mac.
Planning on rebuilding the RPC so could read the disks there (assuming the drive is OK) too.
I found a large pile of old 3.5" PC floppies a while back so used a Pentium 4 machine to check them all before listing them for sale (surprisingly approx 90%+ were still OK).

On the to do list is to go through the old 5.25" beeb disks and see what still works too. Have been fixing a couple of Beebs to facilitate this. (Used to run a PD library for the Beeb so have a few disks).

OK maybe i am being a bit daft. I appears that 0.28 of SCSISoftUSB is included in the latest ROM images. However when I plug in the USB floppy drive it is not recognised. When I run the SCSISoftUSB module (v0.25) downloaded i think from another thread here (it may have been modified) – the USB floppy drive shows up as a USB device and accessible (rear and write).

I suspect there may be more to this than meets the eye. AFAIK USB floppies don’t work on RISC OS, even for DOS discs, although I’m happy to be proved wrong. However, I think there was some work done some years back to “sort of” get some USB floppy drives working “somehow”. I never tried, so I don’t recall the details. It is possible that someone hacked a USB module, or otherwise did some mods to allow some form of operation. However, I don’t think it was ever a formal thing.

So, perhaps a bit more details on how you previously went about doing this, and where (if you can recall) you got things, that’d be great.

Incidentally, SCSIsoftUSB is simply the driver which interfaces between the SCSI filing system and USB system (allowing USB discs to appear as SCSI::x.$). It isn’t floppy related (AFAIK) unless it was modified to do that at some point (which is possible).

Edit – it looks like Colin Granville produced this in 2019. There’s a thread on these forums if you search. I suspect this wasn’t accepted back to the main USB stack (getting changes through isn’t easy) so it is likely that you need to run versions created by Colin.

yes i do remember it being a ‘hack’ of some sort
yes found the thread with Colin and Jon amongst others working on it
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/13956?page=5
there is a link to SCSISoftUSB on Feb 9 2019 3:02pm.

Looks like it wasn’t developed further, so what I have works (with limitations) but will suffice for when it is needed.

I honestly can’t remember any of that…it was pre-Covid.

Where I’ve been enhancing ADFFS lately, I did notice I’d coded a full ADFS implementation for physical floppies, which I guess I’d planned to bundle with ADFFS at some point. It essentially replaces the stub ADFS that ADFFS currently loads on modern machines that don’t implement ADFS.

I also obtained a lot of USB floppy drives to do all the testing, so perhaps I’ll give it a revisit to see what state it’s in. I suspect it wasn’t 100% reliable, otherwise I would have released at the time. Probably worth me revisiting with RO5.30 though.

I’ll have to test it and report back.

EDIT: Every test I performed resulted in RISC OS hard-locking when touching the floppy, so I guess it’s back to the drawing-board