Do you miss the iconic sounds of mechanical click-clacking from original Apple II floppy drives? Does the familiar rattling of a boot floppy bring a smile to your face? Today I’m introducing a new product called Noisy Disk. This board uses a mechanical relay to create authentic-sounding disk head movements for the BMOW Floppy Emu disk emulator. Sure it’s useless, but it’s useless fun.

The Noisy Disk board attaches inline with your existing Floppy Emu cable, using the provided 6-inch extension cable. When Floppy Emu is configured to emulate a 5.25 inch Apple II floppy drive, the Noisy Disk onboard relay snaps open and shut whenever the emulated disk steps from one track to the next. It creates a symphony of disk noise that will bring back memories of 1979.

Noisy Disk is compatible with Apple II family computers while using Floppy Emu in 5.25 inch emulation mode. Nothing will be harmed if Noisy Disk is used with other computers or emulation modes, but you’ll hear strange clacking noises that don’t match the disk activity. It’s recommended to use Noisy Disk in 5.25 inch emulation mode only.

The product includes the Noisy Disk board with 2 x 10 pin rectangular input and output connectors, and a 6-inch extension cable for connecting to your Floppy Emu board.

Noisy Disk is available now at the BMOW Store.

If you’ve been waiting for a Daisy Chainer for your BMOW Floppy Emu disk emulator, I’m happy to report that it’s ready to go. The Daisy Chainer board makes it possible to insert a Floppy Emu anywhere into your daisy chain of Apple II drives, with other floppy drives before and/or after it in the chain. It provides a nice improvement in flexibility for Apple IIGS owners and other Apple II users with complex drive setups.

I have a couple of hand-assembled Daisy Chainers available for sale now, and I’m seeking a few early adopters who have time to exercise it this week with their computer and drives. I need to make sure these first units get into the hands of people who can try them ASAP and confirm compatibility with their equipment, before I move ahead with manufacturing more. If you’ve got the time and the desire, send me a note!

New features are blooming like May flowers for the Floppy Emu disk emulator. This firmware update has something for everyone!

Lisa

The emulated rotation speed of Lisa floppy disks can now be manually adjusted within a range of +/- 6 percent. This only affects the TACH signal that the Lisa uses to sense the drive speed – it has no effect on the actual bit rate which remains 500 Kbps. The speed adjustment is set after selecting “Lisa floppy” as the emulation mode. Adjustments may help some Lisa owners with hardware different from my test system and who reported disk speed errors.

Apple II

• Smartport disk images can now have descriptive names like “SMART0-game-archive.PO”. So long as the filename begins with “SMART” plus a unit digit 0 through 3 it will be used for that Smartport unit. The rest of the name is ignored.
• Added support for 40-track / 160K 5.25 inch disks
• bug fix: NIB disks can now be ejected normally

All computers with Floppy Emu Model C

The OLED display will be dimmed after 30 seconds of inactivity. Any disk I/O or user interaction will return it to normal brightness.

 
Download the new firmware:

Mac/Lisa firmware: mac-lisa-0.8F-F14
Apple II firmware for Floppy Emu Model B and C: apple-II-0.2I-F25
Apple II firmware for Floppy Emu Model A: apple-II-0.2I-F22

Good news: the Daisy Chainer for Floppy Emu is finished, and working nicely in all my tests. With the Daisy Chainer, a mix of real and emulated disk drives can be combined into a single Apple II daisy chain for maximum flexibility. The real drives can be attached before or after the Floppy Emu.

I have a few Daisy Chainer boards available for sale now. Send me an email if you’re interested in getting one (use the Contact link at the page’s upper-right).

Not-so-good news: newly-assembled Daisy Chainer boards are a pain to test, and this is something I didn’t account for. A true functional test requires connecting the board to a Floppy Emu, an Apple II, and a variety of other disk drives, and then running through many different permutations of daisy chain configuration and disk emulation modes. It requires 15 minutes or more. That’s OK for a few hand-assembled units, but there’s no way I can do that for a larger production run.

To support faster testing, I’ve designed two special test boards that plug into the male and female DB19 connectors on the Daisy Chainer. These will enable some automated loopback testing of the main board using its own microcontroller. It won’t be a perfect test, but combined with some other automated tests for things like pin-to-pin solder shorts it should detect most likely assembly defects.

The problem is that in order to support the automated testing with the special test boards, I need to make some modifications to the Daisy Chainer PCB. I’ve finished that work, but I’m waiting for PCB delivery and then I need to assemble a second prototype. So it will probably be at least a month until full production of more Daisy Chainers is possible.

This is the first time I’ve ever been forced to redesign a PCB not because there was a problem with the device itself, but simply because the device was difficult to test efficiently. Lesson learned: when designing anything that you expect to build more than 10 units of, planning for testing should be an integral part of the design process.

Celebrate Friday with a firmware update for the Floppy Emu disk emulator! This firmware adds a handy new disk emulation mode for Apple IIGS computers called Smartport Unit 2 mode. It’s what I called “chameleon mode” in an earlier post, and it’s very helpful for one specific configuration: you’re using the Floppy Emu as a Smartport hard disk, and the Emu is “unit 2” daisy-chained behind an Apple 3.5 inch floppy drive. With the new firmware, it’s now possible to boot from Smartport unit 2!

Normally an Apple IIgs in this configuration could only boot from the Apple 3.5 inch floppy drive (the 1st drive unit in slot 5), limiting the configuration’s usefuleness. Smartport Unit 2 mode causes the Floppy Emu to initially appear as a 5.25 inch drive in slot 6, which the IIgs will boot from, and load a small bootstrap program. This program will modify the Smartport unit priority table in RAM to give Unit 2 priority over Unit 1, and then reboot from slot 5. Presto, unit 2 boots.

You should only use Smartport Unit 2 mode when the Floppy Emu is daisy-chained behind an Apple 3.5 inch floppy drive. In all other cases, continue to use regular Smartport mode.

Get the firmware here: apple-II-0.2H-F25-modelBC

Note this firmware also contains some changes needed to support the forthcoming Daisy Chain Adapter. There shouldn’t be any visible differences, but be on the lookout for possible problems with daisy chaining, so you can revert to the previous firmware version if needed.

Here’s a fun party trick: firmware for the Floppy Emu disk emulator that emulates a 5.25 inch floppy drive, but then reconfigures on the fly as a Smartport hard disk emulator. Why is this useful? It’s not obvious at first, but if you’re a Floppy Emu owner with an Apple IIgs and an Apple 3.5 inch floppy drive, read on. Or if you just like nifty hacks, this one’s for you.

The IIgs supports daisy-chaining up to six disk drives – a great feature. Unfortunately there are strict rules about what order the drives must appear in the chain, depending on their type, and there are further limitations on which drives can be used as boot drives. So there are some perfectly reasonable drive combinations that are impossible in practice.

The best example is a Floppy Emu configured for Smartport hard disk emulation mode, combined in a daisy chain with an Apple 3.5 inch floppy drive. IIgs owners want to boot from the Emu’s Smartport HD most of the time, but still want the flexibility of having a 3.5 inch drive for the occasional physical floppy. Apple says no. Drive ordering rules require the 3.5 inch drive to appear before any Smartport drives, and only the first drive in the chain can be used to boot the computer. The IIgs will always attempt to boot from the Apple 3.5 inch drive. So the desired configuration is impossible, and this is a limitation of the Apple IIgs design rather than anything specific to the Floppy Emu.

But wait… maybe there’s a hope. Eric Jacobs points out there’s a table that controls the boot priority of the drives in the daisy chain, located in Apple IIgs memory at address E10FC0. This table is initialized during a cold boot and gives the first drive first priority. If you edit the memory table and then restart with a warm boot, you can force the IIgs to boot from a different drive, like the Emu’s Smartport HD instead of the Apple 3.5 inch drive.

That’s good news, and it provides a theoretical solution, but the actual practice is lousy. You have to turn on the computer, interrupt the boot process with control-reset, enter the Apple II system monitor with CALL -151, and manually edit the memory table using arcane debug commands. Then you finish the process by forcing a jump to the warm start address. Several months ago I confirmed that this process works, but it’s not very user-friendly, so I dropped it.

Here’s where part two of this party trick comes into play. The IIgs also supports 5.25 inch floppy drives, which must be connected in the daisy chain after any 3.5 inch and Smartport drives, but nevertheless normally get a higher boot priority than the other drive types. I can leverage this fact to make the Floppy Emu appear as a 5.25 inch drive, which loads a small bootstrap program that edits the memory table. Then the Floppy Emu auto-reconfigures itself as a Smartport drive, and the bootstrap program performs a warm start of the IIgs.

Here’s the play-by-play process:

1. Connect the Apple 3.5 inch drive to the Apple IIgs
2. Connect Floppy Emu to the Apple 3.5 inch drive
3. Turn on the Apple IIgs
4. Floppy Emu configures itself as a 5.25 inch drive
5. Floppy Emu provides a hard-coded disk image containing a bootstrap program
6. Apple IIgs boots from the 5.25 inch bootstrap disk
7. Bootstrap program displays a splash screen and modifies the IIgs memory table
8. Floppy Emu reconfigures itself as a Smartport HD
9. Bootstrap program performs a restart of the IIgs
10. IIgs boots from the Floppy Emu’s Smartport HD

The net result is that it’s now possible to have an Apple 3.5 drive and a Floppy Emu Smartport HD in the same daisy chain, while booting from the Emu’s HD – something that was previously impossible.

Watch the video carefully, and you’ll see a text screen flash by that says “Big Mess o’ Wires, rebooting from smartport unit 2…” That’s the bootstrap program at work. Unfortunately my composite video to HDMI adapter creates ~5 seconds of blackness whenever the IIgs first powers on, or changes between text and graphics modes, so this isn’t the greatest video. The whole process from power on to Smartport HD boot only takes about 10 seconds, with no user intervention needed.

It works, but there are still some details to resolve. There’s a timing dependency between when the computer boots, when the Floppy Emu reconfigures as a Smartport HD, and when the bootstrap program restarts the IIgs. I used hard-coded delays that work on my system, but may not work for other people. Get these delays wrong, and the IIgs will fail to boot from the bootstrap disk, or will restart and try to boot from the Smartport HD before the Floppy Emu has reconfigured itself. A better solution would involve some kind of control signal between the IIgs and the Floppy Emu to orchestrate the timing, rather than relying on fixed delays with no feedback.

A second problem is that this trick is incompatible with my (yet to be released) Daisy Chain Adapter. The Daisy Chain adapter senses what type of disk the Floppy Emu is configured to emulate, and acts accordingly. It can’t support a Floppy Emu that suddenly transforms from a 5.25 inch drive into a Smartport HD in the middle of operation. There needs to be some way for it to detect that this has happened, or be notified that it’s happened, so it can reset its own internal state. But so far I’m lacking any practical ideas on how to do that. In the worst case I can simply warn users that this firmware trick is incompatible with use of the Daisy Chainer, but that would be a shame.