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Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2015 6:14 pm
by jorodr
Hello,

Finally I have found a time to finish my work. I hope you will like it :)

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2015 6:21 pm
by Hialmar
Awesome !

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2015 7:10 pm
by coco.oric
Nice work
These are a top oric upgrade

Can you precise if it's working with sedoric of if it's limited to apple dos adapted to the oric ?

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2015 5:55 pm
by Chema
Yes, please. Give us more details... Is it a replacement for a disk system? Is it compatible with any others? Can we see it working?

Looks incredible!

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2015 6:19 pm
by Hialmar
I have one of the prototypes.

Basically it's the equivalent to the Pravetz 8D disk drive. Therefore it works with Bobby Dos which is almost equivalent to the Apple II Dos 3.3.
The small Drive on the emulator was originally built for Apple II by the way.
I don't know if it was modified slightly though so I won't try mine on an Apple II.

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2015 9:05 pm
by jorodr
Hello,

The device is working very fast and reliable under Dos 8D. All of the multifile games for Oric are modified to work under that OS. There are some software that work only under that dos. In the file attached you could read English manual with screenshots I have wrote.
The device work with real Apple ][ drives too and 3.5" drive with a little extension attached. You don't need Oric PSU anymore - the computer and SD drive need just some PC PSU instead.
You could see Halmar's device at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7HtZP4Rhk

regards

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2015 9:30 pm
by Dbug
Low level wise, how different is it to address these controllers compared to a microdisc or Jasmin?
How is the boot sequence?

Basically, would it be possible to make a floppy that can boot both on Microdisc and the Apple based systems, or is the disk encoding totally different?

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2015 10:07 pm
by jorodr
This is completely different device compared to Microdisc devices. But Dos 8D is not bad compared to Sedoric, it's better in lot of ways.

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 8:09 am
by Dbug
jorodr wrote:This is completely different device compared to Microdisc devices. But Dos 8D is not bad compared to Sedoric, it's better in lot of ways.
Sure, but I was wondering how difficult it would be to make a floppy/loader that could work on both devices, for example to make the games and demos run fine on both Microdisc and 8D type devices.

If the geometry is similar (tracks and sectors), and somewhat it's possible to add bootable information for the 8D without destroying the data the Microdisc rom expect to have, it would be possible to make DSK files that can run on the two types of controllers (with different loading code of course).

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 8:46 am
by iss
Because I really like very much the FloppyBuilder, I'll be the happiest man if we have such triple boot loader (microdisk+jasmin+dos8d).
Currently I'm not very optimistic, but it should be doable.

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 9:57 am
by Godzil
DBug: the way the floppy is written is quite different from the standard floppy using on most computer and the CAV floppy used by Apple on the ][ and earlier 400/800K Macintosh Floppies.

I don't think it would be possible to do an universal floppy image that would work for Microdisc/Jasmin and this Apple ][ based floppy drive.

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 12:03 pm
by Dbug
Godzil wrote:DBug: the way the floppy is written is quite different from the standard floppy using on most computer and the CAV floppy used by Apple on the ][ and earlier 400/800K Macintosh Floppies.

I don't think it would be possible to do an universal floppy image that would work for Microdisc/Jasmin and this Apple ][ based floppy drive.
It may still be possible to have FloppyBuilder generate an Apple type floppy image from the same description file.

If somebody has around something like an equivalent to TAP2DSK that can generate 8D compatible floppies, that should be doable, assuming there is still a concept of sectors, tracks and bootable sectors.

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 12:13 pm
by Godzil
Modifying FloppyBuilder to generate a floppy for the ][ format, yes that is a possibility, and yes the concept of track/sector/head exist toom but the physical level is quite different

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 6:13 pm
by Hialmar
Thanks for the manual Jorodr.

I will try to do something like tap2dsk for Bobby Dos ASAP.
It should be easy to adapt the tools that are available for Apple 2 DOS 3.3.

Re: Oric SD Drive in production

Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2015 7:17 am
by jorodr
Hialmar you coul use CiderPress:

http://a2ciderpress.com/

This is very useful tool to work with Apple ][ images. But to write tap images you must delete synchro row I thing.
It's been a long time ago, have I sent you the patched Oric games for Dos 8D?