Re: Floppy disk emulator for Lisa

Great, I'm glad it's working well for you! In the end, it only took one bug fix and one speed adjustment to get the existing Macintosh floppy emulation working for the Lisa. I would have done it much sooner if I'd had a Lisa system of my own, but thankfully I eventually found somebody willing to lend one.

Next stop, Apple II floppy emulation! But that's a topic for a different mailing list. ;-)

Steve

On Mar 29, 2015, at 8:39 AM, David Schmenk <dschmenk_at_email.domain.hidden> wrote:

> Steve-
>
> This floppy emulator has revived my Lisa love. In combination with the X/Profile, I am in Lisa Heaven. I was finally able to install the development kit for XENIX after failing to get the old floppy drive working. Next, play with the Workshop. Thank you for such an incredible product,
>
> Dave...
>
> On Sunday, 1 March 2015 11:34:50 UTC-8, Steve Chamberlin wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've been working on a floppy disk emulator for the Lisa, and thought the folks here would be interested. I previously developed some hardware called Floppy Emu for the vintage Macintosh, which emulates 400K, 800K, and 1440K floppies as well as the Apple HD20 hard disk. Recently I started thinking about what might be necessary to add Lisa support, since the 400K and 800K floppy mechanisms are actually the same between the Lisa and the Mac. In theory it should be possible to add Lisa support purely through firmware changes, using the existing hardware.
>
> With the help of some very kind Lisa experts and a borrowed Lisa 2/10, I've been running some tests and doing some experiments, using BLU as well as a custom floppy test program. You can read about the progress so far here:
>
> http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/02/21/apple-lisa-floppy-emulation/
> http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/02/23/lassoing-the-lisa/
> http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/02/24/lisa-emu-day-3/
>
> Currently with the Lisa test firmware, the Floppy Emu works on a Lisa 2/10, for reading and writing emulated 400K and 800K Macintosh floppy disks under Macworks. But it's too slow to be very useable, and I think there are repeated low-level errors happening that are slowing down floppy I/O. The current Lisa test firmware doesn't seem to work at all on the Lisa 2/5.
>
> Once emulation of Macintosh floppies is working smoothly under Macworks (I hope), I plan to add additional firmware support for native Lisa format floppies, so the hardware could be used to boot the Lisa and run under the Lisa Office System.
>
>
>
>
>
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