Seeking Daisy Chainer Early Adopters
If you’ve been waiting for a Daisy Chainer for your BMOW Floppy Emu disk emulator, I’m happy to report that it’s ready to go. The Daisy Chainer board makes it possible to insert a Floppy Emu anywhere into your daisy chain of Apple II drives, with other floppy drives before and/or after it in the chain. It provides a nice improvement in flexibility for Apple IIGS owners and other Apple II users with complex drive setups.
I have a couple of hand-assembled Daisy Chainers available for sale now, and I’m seeking a few early adopters who have time to exercise it this week with their computer and drives. I need to make sure these first units get into the hands of people who can try them ASAP and confirm compatibility with their equipment, before I move ahead with manufacturing more. If you’ve got the time and the desire, send me a note!
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I’d love to purchase one of the early Daisy Chainer devices.
Contact me, I’m interested. I have a floppyemu, IIe, //c, //gs amongst other things.
I can help out with this. Would love to have this ability and see if it still works like the setup I made by utilizing the pass through board out of a regular 3.5 drive.
Steve,
I am willing to help out. Let me know what I need to do. I have seven Floppy EMU units. At least one from each revision and one of each model of Apple II from the IIe to the IIgs including different ROM revisions.
Thanks,
Jay
I’m not ready to test it before, but the comment above about the amount of Floppy Emu’s let me ask:
Would the Daisy-Chainer connect together a number of FloppyEmu’s?
Thanks, I’ve got enough Daisy Chainer people for the moment. Yes, it can daisy chain multiple Floppy Emu boards just as it can other types of disk drives.
There is no way to make this work with the Apple IIc Drive Switcher, correct? The connectors are different.
If not, and if it is not too late, maybe you can build the external drive switcher part functionality into the board.
What kind of drive daisy chain do you want to create? The Daisy Chainer isn’t really useful for the Apple IIc, because all of the normal drive combinations the IIc supports can already be achieved as-is, or with the Internal / External Drive Switcher for IIc. The Daisy Chainer is mainly for the Apple IIgs, or to a smaller extent for the IIe with certain disk controller cards.
I guess that is a good point. Currently I have an external 5.25″ drive that I basically never use.
I don’t have a real good use case, other than trying to not have to unplug cables to switch between configurations and wanting to be able to use my internal and external 5.25″ drive, or a second floppy emu. I don’t know how many drives the Apple IIc supports with external 5.25″ drives in combination with smartport hard drives and 3.5″ drives. The idea would be able to use the switcher to allow the floppy emu to be booted maybe as a smart port drive, use the internal drive, and also anything else like my external 5.25″ drive or a 3.5″ drive. At the same time without unplugging anything, allow the floppy emu to be booted as the internal 5.25″ drive, and still use the external 5.25″ drive. It is all a bit confusing.
A really far out idea would be to make a new floppy emu (or maybe updated firmware) just for the Apple IIc that would have the drive switcher capability in software, and a second port with both connector types so you can plug another floppy emu or an external drive to it. Then the IIc floppy emu would be configurable with buttons to define all the drives you want set up such as:
A) Internal drive acts as internal drive, floppy emu acts as smartport hard drive, additional port can be used for external 5.25″ drive or another floppy emu
B) Floppy emu acts as internal drive, additional port acts as smartport that could be another floppy emu or a 3.5″ drive, internal drive acts as drive daisy chained at the outside end of that smartport
I’m not in a position to help with beta testing, but I’d love to sign up for pre-orders when they go into production. Is that possible?
There’s no formal pre-order system, but there will be more than enough to go around. I’m probably looking at August for wider availability.
Would love to get this for my apple iie setup!
Hi, I’m looking forward to your the Daisy Chainer also, and it’s middle of August now.
Could you give us the availability update ?
Daisy Chainers should be ready next week.