The Sinclair QL Forum

I have bought an HxC floppy emulator to replace an 'old' floppy drive. I use a flat cable connected to a cumana controller and I adjusted the old floppy drive to work as master not as slave (from memory).

Now I want to use the HXC instead of the floppy drive. Can anyone please inform me how can I connect this to the HXC, what jumper settings to use, what config settings to use and how to create a compatible floppy image? Can I use the existing (untwisted) flat cable?

Thanks in advance,

Philip.

Ah well, if you had purchased the HxC emulator from me, or been a member of Quanta, you would have access to my guide on using it with the QL....

Actually, drop me a pm with your email address and I will send the guide I wrote - if I think on I will email the guide to Dilwyn to add to the Sinclair QL Homepage

The article on using a HxC Floppy Drive emulator with the QL now appears on the Sinclair QL Homepage - http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/manuals/index.html

Direct link is: http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/manuals/Si ... rticle.pdf

Thanks Dilwyn

Thank you Rich for publishing this guide - a selfless contribution to the community as always

Thanks for the PDF!

Rich, Thanks for posting the guide.

Got it working, the problem was mostly the flat cable that is reversed, by cutting the lug with a stanley knife, the problem is resoved.

I also got some images working. .flp images can be read as raw images and can thus be directly transfered to HFE format with HxCFloppyEmulator for windows or osx. I tried discover.flp, and this works.

An empty HFE image in QDOS format can be generated by selecting an empty DOS 720k DD HFE image (downloadable from http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/ ) and formatting it from the QL.

If you convert this back to a raw image using HxCFloppyEmulator, it than can be filled with files with the aid of q-emulator. Then transfer back with HxCFloppyEmulator to HFE and you got a working image in the QL.

It is an elegant generic solution for retro-computers, can be used with several systems, not restricted the QL.

Thanks,

Philip.

These guys need some competition: their prices are rather high.

They are cheap compared to some of the floppy disk emulators out there!

I counted $9 of components there. £6.

Good mark-up.

Dave wrote:I counted $9 of components there. £6.

Good mark-up.

Dave - comments like that will not help your own hardware ventures if people want to judge your prices against the cost of components you can see!

Maybe - although you can't base prices JUST on the cost of components. There are of course initial design costs and the costs of producing prototype PCBs, and the PCBs / minium order requirements for components.

The designer spends a lot of time improving the software and supporting users and new equipment which needs access to floppy disk drives. The designer deserves some recompense for this - or else I am sure he would have turned his back on the project long ago....