Microdrive

Discussion and advice about emulating the QL on other machines.
MIST
Chuggy Microdrive
Posts: 51
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 9:37 am

Re: Microdrive

Post by MIST »

The arm is doing all the usb stuff and controls the on screen display. If you use ps2 keyboards and mice and map the menu options to physical buttons and switches and load the rom and a mdv image into flash then you don't need the arm anymore.


MIST
Chuggy Microdrive
Posts: 51
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 9:37 am

Re: Microdrive

Post by MIST »

Martin_Head wrote: 2. The Qemulator .mdv image files (size varies). This comprises of a special header, followed by Sector zero, then the highest good sector, followed by sectors counting down to sector 1. There are no preambles or checksums for the blocks.
Please tell me the details of this format. I'd like to convert this into the qlay format.


MIST
Chuggy Microdrive
Posts: 51
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 9:37 am

Re: Microdrive

Post by MIST »

Nevermind. It wasn't too hard to guess. Attached is a quick hack for a qemu2qlay converter that runs on a Linux PC.
Attachments
qemu2qlay.zip
Q-Emulator to QLAY MDV converter
(1.33 KiB) Downloaded 187 times


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XorA
Site Admin
Posts: 1359
Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:31 am
Location: Shotts, North Lanarkshire, Scotland, UK

Re: Microdrive

Post by XorA »

As I found this thread had the final little bits of MDV info I needed to implement write support in my sQLay3 emulator I thought I would revive it.

Based on the MiST source, Minerva source and details in this thread I have implemented read/write support for MDV files by emulating the hardware and not trapping the ROM calls.

https://github.com/xXorAa/sQ68Lay

The relevant source file for quick access is src/qlay_io.c which started as a port of the qlay2 file, but I could not make head nor tail of the MDV state machine in that.

One gotcha I found is JS and Minerva use different timing constants for write *grumble grumble*


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