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Four Little Updates

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Some brief updates on Floppy Emu, Plus Too, and the DiskCopy2Dsk tool:

Two Apple IIc Plus testers reported this week that the Floppy Emu disk emulator is incompatible in 3.5 inch emulation mode with that machine. If you’re not familiar with the IIc+, it’s an uncommon member of the Apple II family, and is a souped-up version of the more common IIc with an internal 3.5 inch floppy drive. While 5.25 inch disk emulation and Smartport hard disk emulation work fine with the IIc+, 3.5 inch emulation does not, for unknown reasons. Apparently the disk interface on the IIc+ differs from that on the IIgs and on the external Apple 3.5 Drive, which were the basis for Floppy Emu’s 3.5 inch Apple II emulation mode. Unfortunately IIc+ systems are fairly rare, and I don’t have one to test. If anyone has technical info on the IIc+ disk interface that they could share, please contact me.

A minor update of the Floppy Emu firmware for Lisa and Mac HD20 is available: hd20-0.7C-F14.5. This resolves an issue where a “fatal error: 0x96 sync” sometimes occurred during file copies in HD20 mode. Thanks to Joe Strosnider for reporting this issue and helping to text the fix. You can download the new firmware from the Floppy Emu page.

For anyone working with Macintosh DiskCopy 4.2 disk images, a bug was fixed in the command-line version of the dc2dsk tool. The tool converts DiskCopy 4.2 disk images into raw .dsk images with no header. Now that Floppy Emu directly supports DC42 image files, the tool isn’t necessary anymore, but if anyone’s used it for other purposes this will fix a bug in the image size calculation. For the curious, more info about why this tool was needed can be found here.

Magnus Karlsson has ported the Plus Too design to the Pipistrello FPGA board. Plus Too is a working hardware replica of the Macintosh Plus computer, originally developed by me in 2011. Recently Till Harbaum revived the project, ported it to the MiST FPGA board, and made major fixes and improvements. Magnus picked up the MiST code and adapted it to the Pipistrello board, where it’s still a work in progress but successfully boots to the Mac desktop. More info on this project is in the Saanmila discussion forum.

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