MiSTer FPGA Forum

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Sun Aug 28, 2022 7:09 pm It is possible but it doesn't work right. mounts fine, reads the floppy disk but when you read from it something weird happens like it runs out of a buffer somewhere and just stalls when copying. Caldors steps are correct but it has been more than a year since I did it. Create an empty USB_FLOPPY.img file, symlink the read drive into it, then mount in the core. If I remember corrctly "ln -s" from /media/floppy to the .img. In the core it would mount and interact but would eventually fail. I gave up because it is just another media that you really should be using a digital version with anyway. Floppies are so prone to failure that it's just a gimmick for something like mister.

on the mister side, I could cat the contents of the /media/floppy first into the .img file and everything would work perfectly, doing it hot with a symlink only allowed for partial reading, etc. Like I said, it almost felt like a buffer was filling up somewhere.

NightShadowPT wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 4:55 am

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Sun Aug 28, 2022 7:09 pm It is possible but it doesn't work right. mounts fine, reads the floppy disk but when you read from it something weird happens like it runs out of a buffer somewhere and just stalls when copying. Caldors steps are correct but it has been more than a year since I did it. Create an empty USB_FLOPPY.img file, symlink the read drive into it, then mount in the core. If I remember corrctly "ln -s" from /media/floppy to the .img. In the core it would mount and interact but would eventually fail. I gave up because it is just another media that you really should be using a digital version with anyway. Floppies are so prone to failure that it's just a gimmick for something like mister.

on the mister side, I could cat the contents of the /media/floppy first into the .img file and everything would work perfectly, doing it hot with a symlink only allowed for partial reading, etc. Like I said, it almost felt like a buffer was filling up somewhere.

That's quite interesting...
When you say it stalls, do you mean when reading the floppy? Or when writing?

Seems like the basics do make it work are in place, maybe just a few adjustments will make it possible.

Regarding floppies as a media, I agree they are not to be trusted, but:

a) I still have a lot of original games on Floppy that I would like to be able to play using the MiSTer
b) I would like to recover some of my save games from floppy and get it into AO486 (yes, I know I have other options for this)
c) The sound of the floppy drive working plays a huge role in my nostalgia. It just makes it feel more real.
d) It will make the AO486 core feel a lot more like original hardware (problems and all)

With this being said, making it work is beyond my technical skills, so I need to keep my fingers crossed this topic will interest a dev enough for it to address it and get floppies working.



Thanks

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 12:42 pm Yeah, Don't get me wrong, I was excited to see it do "something" with my disks. you can interact with the disk, you can run dir, as soon as you start copying files or run programs it will get to a certain point and just sit there forever with the drive clicking away. I had to reboot the core to get it back. These are known good floppies. It really is easy to test for yourself if you know the linux side at all. Mine is just one of those cheap USB drives from amazon. I didn't go beyond testing a few different disks.

Malor wrote: ↑Wed Aug 31, 2022 9:11 am Remember that all floppies are wearing out, so running from them means you're gradually wrecking them, and there aren't new ones being made.

My suggestion would be to use DD in Linux to copy each of your original floppies to an image file, run from the images, and carefully preserve the originals. That puts the least wear possible on a limited resource.

If they're significantly copy-protected, however, that would probably make things much more difficult.

kathleen wrote: ↑Thu Sep 01, 2022 10:18 am @Caldor,
Maybe this video ? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S1kkOexjyg