Attempted to affix a cassette sponge to one of the knackered carts today, no joy, its a bit big even after trimming it down, going to try and take a bit more off and see what happens
I'm betting in the end if we want to keep using microdrives, we'll just have to put an an emulator circuit inside the microdrive with some flash.
When the speccy accesses the microdrive, the emulator writes or reads the data and for good measure runs the motor for extra realism. I'd keep a duff microdrive cartridge inserted. The motor and cartridge uselessly spin:cry: while the data is read/written from flash.
Maybe it could have a (software?) switch between emulator and real drive functionality if you find some cartridges to use.
Sounds like quite a big project (beyond my capabilities) and mcleod_ideafix seems to have had a good start on making an emulator with 8 drives in a microdrive.
I wonder if you could have the emulator outside of the microdrive, between the speccy and the microdrive units. It filters the signals and runs the microdrive motors at the appropriate times. We might need something like this for the hardware purist who doesn't want to mod his drives.
Comments
Not to mention the MB02 interface with 1,86MB per disk and up to 4 drives can be controlled...
When the speccy accesses the microdrive, the emulator writes or reads the data and for good measure runs the motor for extra realism. I'd keep a duff microdrive cartridge inserted. The motor and cartridge uselessly spin:cry: while the data is read/written from flash.
Sounds like quite a big project (beyond my capabilities) and mcleod_ideafix seems to have had a good start on making an emulator with 8 drives in a microdrive.
I wonder if you could have the emulator outside of the microdrive, between the speccy and the microdrive units. It filters the signals and runs the microdrive motors at the appropriate times. We might need something like this for the hardware purist who doesn't want to mod his drives.