RiscOS without floppy support

@ all

Please calm down. This discussion has been going on for a while and AFAIR also on multiple threads.

The user, in this case Micky, has tried various approaches (RPi, RPCEmu Virtual Acorn) to read old floppies, none of which worked (at least not in the full extent he needs). The problem is that all the USB based modern floppy units have a chip that locks them to DOS logic format 1.44MB, and they can’t be used with anything Acorn, Commodore, Atari etc… (this is a very well known issue in the retro community).

Software wise, one could use Virtual Acorn on an PC that still has the Floppy internal interface and that should probably give some result. BUT Micky also had another hard requirement, which is the NetWare support which won’t work on Virtual Acorn (because VA doesn’t really has proper network support).

NetWare does work on RPCEmu, but RPCEmu doesn’t have support for floppy direct access and this is for good reasons, no one (except from Micky has requested such a feature or needs it on a daily base).

So the only solution for Micky (and that IS the only solution) is to buy a RiscPC on eBay, but, according to what Micky has said, they are too expensive for his pockets.

So, unless someone has some old hardware to give him for cheap money, there is NO possible solution for ALL his requirements (which, again, it’s not just the floppy disc access).

People have tried to help him and on multiple threads, so please don’t judge people who have got tired of having multiple threads with the same questions.

Micky has also mentioned that all of this is for fun, because that is what he likes to play with: NetWare and floppy discs, so no life threatening situation is depending on this.

If anyone already has started some floppy controller in FPGA then I am very happy to look at their code and test stuff. (Verilog, please)

There is an already completed WD1772 reimplementation on FPGA: https://github.com/Torlus/firebee-fpga/blob/master/FalconIO_SDCard_IDE_CF/WF_FDC1772_IP/wf1772ip_top_soc.vhd

(sorry VHD)

There are also pseudo drivers for the Amiga emulator on PC to use the greazeweazle HW as a floppy controller. The code is not hard to understand, but it will need some work to be adapted to RISC OS and personally I am not interested in the effort. I don’t know if anyone here is.

With that said, Micky has clearly expressed no interest in the work needed to port the driver or workout a device for the FPGA based WD 1772, so, not even who requested this has motivation strong enough to pursue the work. He actually sounded like “we” (aka some of us) must do the work and for free because “he” needs it. That to my knowledge is rude (aka “I demand that you do it”), but I understand that some people may just express themselves in such a way without wanting necessarily to sound rude. However, when we do this, we can’t expect the world to open the doors to us (I am sure that given the average age here, we are all aware of this).

HTH

I have a Greaseweazle V4.
Still working on going through the documentation on how to use it through software.
The commandline tools are nice but I would like to use it as a mounted drive. And it’s all Python code. Will take me some time to convert that to C++.

The 1772 VHDL code seems quite good.
I’ll have a look on how to get this running on an up5k FPGA (the very cheap ones)
Serial port over USB for the interfacing to the FPGA could facilitate the control of the WD1772 however I wonder if interrupt handling can be done fast enough.
My experience is that 1M baud is quite stable but not fast. Thus big latencies.
Perhaps SPI to the FPGA could be more efficient.
Having a 1772 compatible disk controller could enable the use of real floppies for Acorn emulators. I’m going to test it first in the BBC FPGA implementation. That would eliminate all the middleware stuff. (don’t hold yer breath ;-) )

I know that RiscOS for Raspberry Pi is free. I bought some software for RiscOS like:

Messenger Pro
Organizer 230
CLFiler 144
VirtualRPC-DL
RISC OS 4.39 Upgrade
Doom
Iris
SystemDisc

I would pay for it if it has floppy support. One free version and one commercial version. This is a good idea I think.