Raspberry Pi anyone?

[clemfm]

Just curious as to whether the Pi could work with Kryoflux?

The entire system could fit in the floppy housing, imagine that.............

Jeff at HxC2001 appears to be thinking this way, see:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 41&t=58345

[spags]

The thought has occurred to me before but I never bothered to try and give it a go. Given the lack of responses, I guess others haven't tried either. My guess is it would probably work fine, but I guess you're going to have to test that.

If you decided to go nuts, you could custom make a case with one of those small cheap video panels embedded into the case and use a wireless keyboard dongle. And if you wanted to go really nuts for the truly portable Kryoflux experience, you could make a slightly larger case and embed a bank of rechargeable batteries and regulated power supply.

[mr.vince]

HxC is the other way round... Well known (more or less) data played back. DTC does real time analysis when detecting bands, eg showing modification and other things. Due to new features coming up, hardware specs will go up, not down.

Therefore, the Pi is out of the race. We would prefer any standard machine with Win, Mac OS or Linux.

I understand why the Raspi is cool; it serves our PBX. But that's a different scenario again.

[JASPP]

Is the driver source code available for the Kryoflux? I'd be interested in coding a driver under RISCOS on the Pi to provide a 1772 FDC.

As part of the JASPP project (getting Archimedes games to run on the Pi), one thing that is often raise is there's no floppy drive available for RISCOS. USB floppies wont work as they don't support the disk structure ADFS requires, but using the Kryoflux would work around the issue.

[mr.vince]

I need to reply to that very lenghty email you sent.

If I get it right, you want to use the KF board to emulate a floppy controller to use a real floppy drive with the computer under the OS. Because of the nature of USB this is not going to work like on the real machine, emulation will always need to be paused a little when data is read.

If you look at the CAPSLIB (for IPFs) you will see there already is a fully cycle exact 1772 emulator in there.

Counter-question: Why deal with and further damage original media when you can just use an image file?

[MultiDisk]

Actually, I'd be very interested in just a command-line only compile of the kryoflux tools for the raspberry pi, I could easily see me using those to resurrect my autoloader to replace the arduino/canon-camera/laptop with just a raspberry-pi/pi-camera ..

Might need to level shift the sensors / motor controller from 5v to pi 3.3v, but the rest would be kinda easy to do, and totally worth it =)

#tempting

[JASPP]

I need to reply to that very lenghty email you sent.

No rush, at least I know you've received it.

If I get it right, you want to use the KF board to emulate a floppy controller to use a real floppy drive with the computer under the OS.

Correct

Because of the nature of USB this is not going to work like on the real machine, emulation will always need to be paused a little when data is read.

That shouldn't be an issue for general floppy access.

If you look at the CAPSLIB (for IPFs) you will see there already is a fully cycle exact 1772 emulator in there.

Would I be allowed to use this in a driver under RISCOS? Are there any licensing/legal issues I need to be aware of?

Counter-question: Why deal with and further damage original media when you can just use an image file?

We've imaged around 50% of all Archimedes games so from a project perspective there's no requirement to use physical media beyond the initial image creation and subsequent cross-imaging to confirm good originals. Where we have rights to release the games, they're publicly available through the project, however, there's a lot of games we can't release as we've not gained the rights yet, but there are lots of the original media available to buy from the main RISCOS resellers, eBay etc.

The software I've coded for the Pi, namely ADFFS will get a lot of these games running, but you obviously need the game in the first place for it to be usable and there's a lot of people with a lot of original floppies that still use RISCOS.

Essentially this has come from a community request and I've reached out to yourselves to see if we can combine efforts to provide a floppy driver for RISCOS on the Pi.

[mr.vince]

Multidisk: I think we have KF running on the new Raspberry 2, so yes, the new USB can cope with the data rate... Would need to release a build, but if you email me, can get you in touch with the dev.

JASPP: The problem we're facing is a ton of communities reaching out and we only have limited manpower, hence we need to concentrate on what helps our goals. No offense, just not trying to say yes and then not delivering. If you look at the IPF Decoder Library, you will also find the licence. If you want to go through image files, yes, this is covered by the licence. In general, since the MAME licence is used, commercial use is excluded.

[JASPP]

JASPP: The problem we're facing is a ton of communities reaching out and we only have limited manpower, hence we need to concentrate on what helps our goals. No offense, just not trying to say yes and then not delivering.

I appreciate your position. I'm not asking for your time or assistance to write the driver - I can do that, what I'll require is either a TRM for the Kryoflux or source from an existing driver to base it on. I'm happy to give you the end result if it helps your goals.

If you look at the IPF Decoder Library, you will also find the licence. If you want to go through image files, yes, this is covered by the licence. In general, since the MAME licence is used, commercial use is excluded.

I'll look at the library. JASPP precludes commercial use, so we're in alignment on that point.

[clemfm]

Multidisk: I think we have KF running on the new Raspberry 2, so yes, the new USB can cope with the data rate......... The problem we're facing is a ton of communities reaching out and we only have limited manpower, hence we need to concentrate on what helps our goals........

Great!

I'm curious as to which communities are the most demanding? I guess they rank in order of how significant these communities were in the 80's and 90's combined with the interest now. For example, obviously the C64 community is more active than the TRS-80 model II community.

By processor, I'd guess:
6502
Z80
8088/8086
68000