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Anyone familar with HxC Universal Floppy Emulator?
06-06-2017, 10:13 AM
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RE: Anyone familar with HxC Universal Floppy Emulator?
(06-05-2017 02:29 AM)mfleming Wrote:  The thread title is a question for members, particularly European ones. A group in France has developed a floppy drive replacement aimed at the retro gaming community. It can be used in place of a 3.5" drive, drive content can be stored on an SD card or USB flash device, and the user can select which file in flash storage will appear inserted in the floppy drive from the front panel. See these links for details

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/
http://hxc2001.com/

What caught my attention was the wide range of tracks, sectors, sector size, bitrate, RPM, SD/DD, and track encoding method (FM/MFM) supported by the emulator. Since the drive emulator was meant to go into a range of old computing devices (Atari, Amiga, Sinclair, etc.) it had to match the way their controllers used the floppy drive. The floppy emulator supports both reading and writing files to the flash storage disk image by the computer.

In addition to supporting a broad range of floppy hardware replacement scenarios, there is also software to take old floppy disk images (sorry, no LIF but Teledisk format is supported) and transfer them to your flash device. I believe it also allows you to create a target disk on flash and add files to that simulated disk. Seems like the perfect way to archive old disks and transfer content between your PC and an old machine.

Given that there is some overlap between forum interests and general retro computing, I was wondering if anyone has one of these devices. Depending on version, they range from 60 to 100 Euro, and they do show up on TAS (priced in GBP, interestingly enough!). I'm sorely tempted to get one of these, but would like to hear from anyone who has used them.

Comments anyone?
~Mark

I use it all the time with my TRS-80 and Superbrain CP/M machines. It works great!

Tom L

Tom L
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RE: Anyone familar with HxC Universal Floppy Emulator? - toml_12953 - 06-06-2017 10:13 AM



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