Hello! I’m Alice, the engineering intern here at Big Mess o’ Wires. I’m a math with computer science major at UC San Diego, and throughout the summer I’ve been working on some fixes and improvements for BMOW products. I started out on the ADB-USB Wombat, but most of my work has been on Floppy Emu development.
Today, I’m excited to finally share what I’ve been doing! Here is a collection of some of the new Floppy Emu improvements. They’re mostly related to Smartport and Unidisk 3.5 emulation for the Apple II, but there’s some other good stuff too.
Smartport Hard Disk and Unidisk 3.5 emulation:
– Control commands are now handled better. This resolves GS/OS freezes during shutdown or restart, and related problems with other software.
– A NAK/retry mechanism was added for cases where there’s a checksum failure on a Read or Status command. It will provide more robustness against signal noise.
– Status commands that request invalid or unsupported status types will now receive a proper error reply.
Unidisk 3.5 emulation:
– Emulation now continues to run even while displaying the disk selection menu. It will respond to commands as an empty drive, instead of not responding at all. This resolves some potential problems when booting from other disks and when swapping disks.
– Handling of disk ejection has been improved. Disks can now be ejected and replaced through the GS/OS Finder menu and other methods of software-controlled disk eject, as well as through the Floppy Emu menu interface.
– The disk icon that’s displayed in GS/OS has been updated to look like a 3.5 inch floppy disk.
General improvements:
– Occasional errors CHECK PIN CLKO-L and CHECK PIN RESET should no longer occur.
– Hidden system directories on the SD card will not be displayed in the disk selection menu, including Windows 10’s “System Volume Information” directory.
– OLED screen dimming behavior is now more consistent.
These improvements are available in firmware versions 0.2T-F30, 0.2S-F29-SPDC, 0.2S-F26, and 0.2H-F15 (depending on the Floppy Emu model and the type of computer it’s used with). You can download the new firmware files on the Floppy Emu page. Let us know if you run into any issues, and have fun!