The new Floppy Emu prototype is up and running at last! Today I was able to boot a Mac Plus from the new emulator board for the first time. It’s still rough around the edges, but it works. Copy a Macintosh disk image to your SD memory card, then plug the Floppy Emu board into your Mac’s external floppy port, and presto: instant disk drive. Your vintage Mac never even knows it’s not the real thing, so everything runs just like it would with a real external floppy drive.

It’s hard to believe it was nearly five months ago that I set out to replace my first ball-of-wires breadboard prototype with something better. The changes seemed simple enough: switch to a more powerful microcontroller from the same family, substitute a different brand of CPLD, add a few more buttons and connectors, and mount the whole thing on a small circuit board. But then I let the project gather dust for a few months, and when I returned to it, almost everything that could possibly go wrong did. Seemingly minor changes to clock speeds and interrupt configurations led to all kinds of head-scratching failures. They’re not interesting enough to detail, but you can imagine a string of long evenings filled with me pounding my fist on the desk and shouting rude things at the monitor.

One of the coolest features of the new board is that the microcontroller can program the CPLD via JTAG, using the XSVF player code that I discussed in my previous post. Copy a firmware.xvf file to the SD card, reset the Floppy Emu board while holding down both PREV and NEXT, and the CPLD will be updated with new firmware in about 20 seconds. That means an external Xilinx programmer isn’t needed at all, which is a huge win. I hope to later implement bootloading of the microcontroller from the SD card too. If I ever reach the point of selling assembled units, that means end users could update both the CPLD and the MCU just by copying the necessary files to the SD card, without any programming hardware at all.

There’s still a lot left to do. I haven’t yet tested write emulation with the new prototype, so that’s the first task. It should work, but it took me so long to get read emulation working that I wanted to savor the success for a while before enabling and testing the write emulation code. Then I’ll look at some new buffering schemes for write emulation, using the extra RAM found in the ATMEGA1284P microcontroller that the new prototype uses. That should hopefully make write emulation more reliable than in the first prototype. At some point, I also need to add support for 400K and 1.4MB floppies, since the current emulator is 800K only.

The user interface needs improvement too. I’d like to add a nicer way to trigger CPLD programming, and a menu to select from among many disk images on the SD card. It would also be nice to add features like an auto-insert option, to insert a particular floppy image into the virtual drive immediately when Floppy Emu is first powered on.

Two features that you probably won’t see are emulation of more than one floppy drive at a time, and emulation of disks larger than 800K (or 1.4MB on those machines that support it). Those limitations come from the Macintosh floppy driver code in ROM, so to change them I’d need to write a new driver, and find a way to load it using the built-in driver so that the new driver replaces the built-in driver after loading. In fact, I’d probably need to write a new driver for every Macintosh model, since they don’t all access the floppy hardware the same way. It’s all theoretically possible, but would be a major software project that I’d prefer to leave to someone else to attempt.

To my friend Tom who keeps hounding me asking when Floppy Emu will be ready, here you go. Your Mac 512K can now live again!