Subject: 5.25" USB floppy adapter

From: Jon Guidry <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:39 -0500

Has anyone seen this yet?  Supports the TI, and no more worrying about finding an old PC and using TI99-PC to read disks...

http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

Jon

---

From: "Ksarul" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:11:29 -0400

I hadn't seen it yet, but there were a few folks on the Vintage Computer
Forum pining away for such a device, so I cross posted this there, Jon.  I
did read the description and noted that it has one limitation: read only.
That makes it great for transfer to the PC, but you still have to go the
routes we are using today if you want to write to the TI disks.

Jim

  _____  

From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
Jon Guidry
Sent: Friday, July 30, 2010 8:01 AM
To: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: [TI994A] 5.25" USB floppy adapter

Has anyone seen this yet? Supports the TI, and no more worrying about
finding an old PC and using TI99-PC to read disks...

Jon

---

From: "Gary from O.P.A." <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:41:25 -0000

Nice, for getting your TI99 to your PC for use on an emulator and such.

But I love to see a device that would work for me, I want to be able to use my REAL TI99 and GENEVE, and I got tons of archived TI99 stuff already on my PC, but I have not found any program that will FORMAT and/or WRITE out 100% correctly images directly onto a 5.25" at least on a today's new PC's, because of the lack of support for 360k and also single-density.

I need to either find a very old PC with good 5.25" support, or someone needs to expand one of these neat devices to include a real disk controller chip, with full format/write/multi-density/multi-rpm support.

---

From: "chris20636" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2010 19:18:06 -0000

USB Floppy Controller <http://www.softpres.org/glossary:kryoflux>

Another work in progress along the same lines.

Chris

---

From: "Paolo Bagnaresi" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 01:45:45 +0200

Gary,

I agree it is not easy to find a PC that fully works in Single Density. 
They *all" work well in Double Density, provided they have a floppy 
connector, of course.

When I wrote TI99-PC I did invite every user to report their 
success/failure with Single Density. The idea was to build a database 
containing how any PC would behave when Single Density was a must. To my 
dismay, I had an extremely low number of reports (say, one or two in 10 
year time).

What do I have to think of it? Possible answers:
- Just two or three people ever used TI99-PC.
- The average user just doesn't care. If the program works, that's enough. 
If it doesn't, well the user is already busy trying to find another way to 
solve his problems. No time for reporting something... and what for? After 
all, the program doesn't work, does it?

Ok, more and more PCs don't have a Floppy Connector nowadays. That's true. 
But it is not like that for any new PC. I recently made a new PC using an 
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2. This motherboard has a floppy connector and fully 
works in Single Density (read, write and format). The mobo has a Winbond 
W83667HG Super I/O Controller (http://www.namai.cn/NewsInfo.asp?id=44). 
Chances are that any mobo using the same Winbond chip will fully work with 
Single Density.

As to the 360 K drive issue. Agreed, if you have a TI equipped with just 
40 track drives and you want to write floppies for it on your PC then you 
surely need a 360 K drive. But you will need that same drive even with a 
USB floppy disk adapter: it doesn't change a thing. Please don't think 
that a USB floppy disk adapter (like the FC5025) will make you do without 
a 360 K drive, if that is what your TI needs.

Since my TI is fully equipped with 80 track drives, I always used standard 
5.25 1.2 MB disk drives with success. Never had a single problem with 
those, aside from the fact that they break down very easily. Better still, 
the magnetic head gets dirty far too easily with some old floppies. After 
which, either you manage to clean very well the magnetic head, or you just 
toss the drive. But this is a problem more with the floppy than with the 
drive, even if it seems the drive doesn't work anymore. At any rate, you 
will have the same problems with an yet to come USB floppy disk adapter 
fully capable of managing every aspect of floppy formatting.

So, all in all, I think you already have a possible solution to your 
floppy needs: TI99-PC, what else? :-)

Paolo

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gary from O.P.A."
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Friday, July 30, 2010 5:41 PM
Subject: [TI994A] Re: 5.25" USB floppy adapter

But I love to see a device that would work for me, I want to be able to 
use my REAL TI99 and GENEVE, and I got tons of archived TI99 stuff already 
on my PC, but I have not found any program that will FORMAT and/or WRITE 
out 100% correctly images directly onto a 5.25" at least on a today's new 
PC's, because of the lack of support for 360k and also single-density.

I need to either find a very old PC with good 5.25" support, or someone 
needs to expand one of these neat devices to include a real disk 
controller chip, with full format/write/multi-density/multi-rpm support.

---

From: "Gary from O.P.A." <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2010 02:03:55 -0000

Thanks for the nice reply to my message, it is good to see you still around.

I been using your TI99-PC program, and I have good luck with transfering some PC99 images over to 3.5" with no problems.

But darn if I could get it to work with 5.25", I have only sadly 1.2mb 5.25" drives, I got one on my PC, and one each on my two of my TI99 machines with 80track Myarc cards.

I am using an ASUS 4core-DualSata board (I have to look at the chipset later, and see) -- It seems to high writing in Single-Density fine to 3.5".

The one problem I would like see done if possible is to code a way to UPCONVERT an image, if you have a PC99 SSSD image, to be able to write it to a 3.5" 80track 2880 disk and fill all the extra sectors as blank space, and update the sector0 to.

As I can use your program to write a PC99 SSSD image to 3.5" 40track single/step SSSD (360sectors) disk with no problems, but for the life of me it can read on my Myarc systems, even at double-step, and it is pain to open up the system and change the 40/80track jumper to see if that would help, as I need it to handle my 2880sectors disks also.

So I been doing it in slow 3 step process, I setup another stock TI99 system, using all TI parts, but installed a 3.5" floppy in it, so I transfer the SSSD image on my PC to a 3.5", and then on my stock TI99 system, transfer it to an old full-height 5.25" which I been able to get to work on the TI99 itself, and then it reads fine on my Myarc system, and then I can transfer it to 3.5" 2880 disk. -- Slow but it works.

At first I didn't even think my transfer of SSSD 3.5" on my PC was working as my stock TI99 was reading it as 104sectors used (instead of 358, and crashing with errors when even loading a basic program), but I found one of my stock TI disk controllers was faulty (lucky I had a spare), plus I found my PCODE card was stopping the 3.5" to work correctly on a stock TI99 even tho it was turned off (weird!).

Anyhow thanks for the reply, and thanks for the great TI99-PC program, it is very useful.

-=(Gary)=-

--- In [email-masked], "Paolo Bagnaresi" <paul.bagnaresi@...> wrote:
> --- In [email-masked], Jon Guidry <jon@> wrote:
> >

---

From: "Gary from O.P.A." <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2010 02:55:42 -0000

Ok, update to my previous message, after some more trial&errors after writing my previous message, I decided to try out some more options.

I tried around some more, and I was able to get the 5.25" to work fine on my PC to write both DSDD and SSSD images and read them directly on my Myarc system. -- Have not tried my stock TI99 yet.

I found, that if I use the TI-99.bat menu you have, and select the options, it forces me to reformat the 5.25" disk I try, and does not give me an option to pick (double-step), so it formats it as single-step, and I using a 1.2mb 5.25" drive on my PC and also on my Myarc machines, so it writes fine, and then turns it into useless crap on my real TI and/or Myarc system.

But if I manually select your TI99-Win program, and pick the options myself, I can format the SSSD and select double-step, and then manually pick the image I wish to write and it does it without asking to reformat, and the result reads fine on my Myarc drive, both SSSD and DSDD 40track images no problem.

I also found for some reason some PC99 SSSD images when selected manually in TI99-Win come back with an error message (wrong or corrupted format), but no error if I use your TI-99.bat menu and select to convert it to a V9T9 image, and then it transfers fine using TI99-Win.

I also find at least with my motherboard on a cold restart, it seems to be better to at least use the 3.5" (which is B:) on my machine at least once with your program, and then no matter what option I pick with 5.25" (A: of course), even single-density it writes and verifys it with no errors, but right away without touching 3.5", on cold boot (I using Windows 'XP), I get sometimes "no disc", "write error", and then nothing works, not even writing to 3.5" disk, until a reboot.

Unlike most other people that might have used your program in the past or currently using it, I am only using it the non-norm way, I trying to get all my previously archived and other useful TI99 programs out of my PC and onto real TI machines, and back slowly onto my TI SCSI drives (which are sadly totally blank!) -- It was a rough start, as I didn't even have one working real TI floppy with anything useful on it, but now thanks to your program I been quickly rebuilding my system and transfering files.

Another program I have used which I find helps in my quest of upconverting images is TI99dir v5.3b, it is nice it allows you to make .DSK images, and select a bunch of TIfiles or V9t9FIAD files and copy them into a DSK image, plus copy single or multi files out of already existing image, but sadly it only allows up to 1600sector images (CF7ones), it does not support possible 80track 3.5" 2880images.

Anyhow that completes my TI99PC report, at least with my Asus motherboard Single-Density writes to 5.25" using a 1.2mb drive seem to work, but for some weird reason I need to at least access a 3.5" disk first, otherwise I get errors on my 5.25".

-=(Gary)=-

--- In [email-masked], "Gary from O.P.A." <garyopa@...> wrote:
> --- In [email-masked], "Paolo Bagnaresi" <paul.bagnaresi@> wrote:
> >
> > Gary,
> >

---

From: fdos <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:24:18 -0700

Paolo,

I know I did at least one report for you, but I didn't take advantage of 
all the different motherboards that I went through in just a couple of 
years.  I don't recall if I tested them all for single density or not. 
I only know that none I have now are capable of single density.  Not a 
problem for my hobby systems as they are all capable of DSDD minimum.

I am, however, a very big user of TI99-PC.  It and TI99dir are my two 
most used PC utility programs supporting my MESS TI/Geneve emulators and 
CF7A+ Sidecar system.

My thanks to you for your great support of our TI/Geneve community.

Bill S

---

From: "Paolo Bagnaresi" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 13:10:10 +0200

From: "Gary from O.P.A."
To: <[email-masked]>
Object: [TI994A] Re: 5.25" using TI99-PC

Gary, you wrote:
> The one problem I would like see done if possible is to
> code a way to UPCONVERT an image, if you have a PC99 SSSD
> image, to be able to write it to a 3.5" 80track 2880
> disk and fill all the extra sectors as blank space,
> and update the sector0 to.

This problem can be easily solved using the TI99-PC.BAT Option 1.7: 
Split/Resize any Disk Image file to a new V9T9 file
This option will copy a source disk to any disk format you want, even to 
non-standard ones, like those created by the new option 3.3 "Format a V9T9 
disk of any size".
In case a single destination disk image file doesn't fully contain the 
source file, additional destination disk image files will be automatically 
created.

I can see from you second post you have already solved the problem with 
transferring disks to 2880 sector 5.25" disks, to be read by your Myarc 
system. Good!

> I found, that if I use the TI-99.bat menu you
> have, and select the options, it forces me to
> reformat the 5.25" disk I try, and does not
> give me an option to pick (double-step), so
> it formats it as single-step, and I using a
> 1.2mb 5.25" drive on my PC and also on my
> Myarc machines, so it writes fine, and then
> turns it into useless crap on my real TI
> and/or Myarc system.

True! But this is a blunder of current version of TI99-PC Win (ver. 1.0). 
While writing a TI Disk and a reformatting is needed, it will not let you 
choose the step you want. It will use the default stepping, which will 
invariably be Single Stepping. That said, the reformatting *is not forced* 
any more if you provide a disk that has already the suitable format. The 
disk will be copied anyway, no matter what stepping was used on the disk. 
This will in a way solve the problem.
As you noted,
> But if I manually select your TI99-Win program,
> and pick the options myself, I can format the
> SSSD and select double-step, and then manually
> pick the image I wish to write and it does it
> without asking to reformat, and the result reads
> fine on my Myarc drive, both SSSD and DSDD
> 40track images no problem.

Right, same as above.

This problem is something that will be taken care of and corrected in the 
next version of TI99-PC.

> I also found for some reason some PC99 SSSD
> images when selected manually in TI99-Win
> come back with an error message (wrong or
> corrupted format), but no error if I use your
> TI-99.bat menu and select to convert it to a
> V9T9 image, and then it transfers fine using
> TI99-Win.

True and normal. Although desirable, current version of TI99-PC Win will 
not provide an automatic intermediate change from PC99 format to V9T9 
format while writing a disk image file to a disk. This could indeed be 
handy, and may be implemented in the next version of TI99-PC. Thank you 
for noticing.

> I also find at least with my motherboard on
> a cold restart, it seems to be better to at
> least use the 3.5" (which is B:) on my machine
> at least once with your program, and then no
> matter what option I pick with 5.25" (A: of
> course), even single-density it writes and
> verifys it with no errors, but right away
> without touching 3.5", on cold boot (I using
> Windows 'XP), I get sometimes "no disc",
> "write error", and then nothing works,
> not even writing to 3.5" disk, until a reboot.

That's strange. Are you sure you have properly set what floppy drive types 
you have in your PC BIOS setup? Haven't you by any chance activated any 
disk swapping, again, in BIOS setup?
As a side note, even my PC FDC gets confused at times if I mess too much 
with wrong disk formats. By simply forcing Windows to read a standard 1.44 
MB DOS disk the problem usually disappears. If it doesn't, and that may 
happen too, I usually reboot, as you do. :-)

> Another program I have used which I find helps
> in my quest of upconverting images is TI99dir
> v5.3b, it is nice it allows you to make .DSK
> images, and select a bunch of TIfiles or
> V9t9FIAD files and copy them into a DSK image,
> plus copy single or multi files out of already
> existing image, but sadly it only allows up to
> 1600sector images (CF7ones), it does not support
> possible 80track 3.5" 2880images.

Ah, my good friend Fred Kaal's program (mmh, thinking well abou about it, 
we are kind of rivals on that field. Interesting ...). The problem sounds 
strange. Are you really sure?  At any rate, TI99-PC handles formats up to 
5760 sector/disk (1.44 MB floppies to be used with Myarc HFDC).

Gary, I would like to thank you for you report. Feedbacks are what any 
programmer really needs. Whithout a feedback, most programs simply die, 
especially those that are of the freeware type. If you program, you have 
got to know how people like/dislike your programs, either from sale 
figures or by users' feedbacks/reports.

Paolo

---

From: "Paolo Bagnaresi" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 13:10:15 +0200

Bill,

you are surely one of my most loyal supporters, no one doubts about that! 
Thank you again for your steady support.

Paolo

---

From: "epergrem" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:54:33 -0000

Hi Paolo,
FYI.  I recently upgraded my older computer to a Gigabye GA-P43-ES36 motherboard.  

I haven't tested it with SSSD yet.  The ITE IT8718 datasheet  indicates that the chip only supports 360K/720K/1.2M/1.44M/2.88M, so I'm not sure there is much point in doing so. 

Ernie

---

From: Owen Brand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 08:55:18 -0400

Paolo, I had often wondered if it were possible to use your program on  
my Windows 7 laptop....  I have a 3.5 drive with a standard  
connector--- only have USB outs on my laptop.  I had heard that USB  
drives won't work with Omniflop, but I was goingto ask you before I  
bought one to test with.  Got sidetracked for awhile, then I just  
found this thread and thought it would be appropriate.  I am going to  
read this thread in it's entirety right now--- but it would be pretty  
awesome to be able to do this without slow as molasses serial  
transfers---one file by one file by one file.....  I could ARC all the  
SSGC entries and unarc them afterwards on my machine--- leaving me  
with only one transfer to do--- but I played all these games on my  
CF7, and I need to make up disks.

Of course they are small..... I could save each to cassette right off  
the CF7 and then transfer them to diskette from there...

Owen Brand

        **webmaster**
http://www.Opry99er.com

On Aug 3, 2010, at 7:54 AM, "epergrem" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I haven't tested it with SSSD yet. The ITE IT8718 datasheet  
> indicates that the chip only supports 360K/720K/1.2M/1.44M/2.88M, so  
> I'm not sure there is much point in doing so.
>
> Ernie
>

---

From: "Paolo Bagnaresi" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 22:21:04 +0200

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "epergrem"
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2010 1:54 PM
Subject: [TI994A] Re: 5.25" USB floppy adapter

> I haven't tested it with SSSD yet.  The ITE IT8718 datasheet  indicates 
> that the chip only
> supports 360K/720K/1.2M/1.44M/2.88M, so I'm not sure there is much point 
> in doing so.

> Ernie

Ernie, please give it a try. No FDC nowadays lists FM (Single Density) 
among the supported formats. In spite of this, some of them do support FM 
(Single Density) in reality. It is worthwhile checking it out anyway: you 
might have a pleasant surprise!

Thanks,

Paolo

---

From: "Paolo Bagnaresi" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 22:21:10 +0200

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Owen Brand"
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2010 2:55 PM
Subject: Re: [TI994A] Re: 5.25" USB floppy adapter

> bought one to test with.

I can confirm. OmniFlop (and TI99-PC Win) will not work on USB devices. 
You have to use a USB device like KryoFlux 
(http://www.softpres.org/glossary:kryoflux) or Device Side Data's FC5025 
USB 5.25" floppy controller  (http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html) for 
floppy transfer on a laptop. I never used them myself, so you are on your 
own there.
I understand they can only read, but not write nor format a TI disk.

> Got sidetracked for awhile, then I just

Yes, a transfer via floppy disk is at least one order of magnitude faster 
than via serial port, but the serial way is available for almost any PC. 
OTOH, TI99-PC/Omniflop needs a FDC and a floppy connector on your 
motherboard, something a new laptop will never have.

> the CF7 and then transfer them to diskette from there...
CF7 is surely a good solution. :-)

Paolo

---

From: fdos <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:44:46 -0700

Paola,

You are more than welcome.

Bill S