The Sinclair QL Forum

I am looking for the floppy interface standard (Shugart or IBM) for the Micro Peripherals interface for the QL, with the QFLP in order to know how to configure floppy drives for that interface.

Anyone know which floppy configuration should be used?
Here are the differences:

Shugart standard:
- Pin 10: Drive select 0
- Pin 12: Drive select 1
- Pin 14: Drive select 2
- Pin 16: Motor on

IBM PC standard (with 'twisted' floppy cable):
- Pin 10: Motor enable A
- Pin 12: Drive select B
- Pin 14: Drive select A
- Pin 16: Motor enable B
Thanks in advance
Tassos

If the controller chip on your interface card is a "WD1772" or less likely a "WD1773", you have a shugart interface.

The controller is the IC7 or the IC13 ? because in the first I have the QFLP from QJUMP and in the second a TI TMS2793NL.
Thanks again
Tassos

It's most probably still a Shugart compatible drive.
The TMS2793 used to be the floppy controller of choice for MSX computers - those used the Shugart configuration. The IBM PC controller was a NEC (768?) and/or INTEL chip if I remember right.

Regards,
Tobias

What is the maximum number of drives that are supported?
If the answer is more than two then it must use a Shugart interface.

Mark

The drives arrived yesterday and although they work fine with the cumana disk extension, they do not work with the Micro-Peripheral (sinclair) with QFLP eprom.
What happens is that although the drives are recognized correctly as FLP1_ and FLP2_ (led lights ) , when I try to access the drive with dir I get an error msg "not found" and with format i get "format failed".
I went through the manual in order to set the dip switches, but I am not sure if the same settings apply here since there is an upgraded QFLP eprom from QJump installed and I could not find a manual for it.
I am not sure if this is a settings problem or a controller hardware fault.
If anyone has any idea it would be greatly appreciated .
Thanks Tassos

How attached are you to the MP floppy interface? At some point it might be more productive to use a more conventional WD1772 controller based interface

Similar behaviour appeared, when I attached Shugart floppy drives to a controller card expecting IBM PC floppy drives.

Dex I don't think this is the problem since all of the QL disk interfaces were shugart and the drives work fine with the cumana Disk interface while they don't work with the Micro peripheral/Sinclair one.
I believe it's a settings (dip switch) problem since the eprom is upgraded to QFLP from qjump and maybe the original settings that are in the manual don't apply here.
TASSOS

Tassos,
you might try and play with the FLP_OPT command to fiddle with the disk startup time. Very fast (new) drives might not be able to cope with the QL waiting for them to spin up too long and then stop again before actually being accessed. This might lead to a "Not found"

FLP_OPT should be included in the QFLP extended range of commands.

Could also be called FLP_START and FLP_STEP that were introduced with Miracle's interfaces. I don't know the range of commands implemented by QFLP. EXTRAS should be able to tell you.

Regards,
Tobias