[haiku-development] Re: Future Haiku Features

>> I plan to work on it someday... but i'll go for my usb-floppy drive
>> which is very different from regular floppies. Unfortunately I don't
>> have a computer capable of running Haiku and still having a floppy
>> drive...
>> I guess they are actually becoming archaic...
>
> Aren't usb floppies actually ATAPI devices or something alike ?
>
> I planned originally to split the pc driver into an FDC bus manager and
> a floppy driver, but I never did.
> Cleanest would likely to move it to the new architecture where it would
> publish an fdc node and drive nodes, and have an usb version of the fdc
> node.

www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/usbmass-ufi10.pdf
http://www.geocities.jp/tedi_world/format_usbfdd_e.html

Basically it's handled like an usb key, except you need to format it
at low level before. ufiformat is a linux tool (with readable
sourcecode) that does it. You use LBA access to address the sectors,
whereas the regular floppy controller needs you to seek tracks and
request sectors on each track. Real FDC is more flexible and can
format disks in various ways (for example you can write disks readabl
on amstrad cpc if you number your sectors starting at 0xC0 instead of
0x00 on each track. Well, I would probably the only one using such a
thing (to natively read/write my CPC floppies under haiku). :o)
Numbering sectors starting at 0xC0 is not possible with the USB
system. There the formatting is done only per-track. You can specify
the number of sectors you want, IIRC, but no one would want anything
except 9 on DD floppies and 18 on HD. Maybe 10 and 20 if we choose to
support the DMF format (or was it 82 tracks instead of 80 ?)

-- 
Adrien Destugues / PulkoMandy
Elève ingénieur ENSSAT EII1- www.enssat.fr
GSoC student for Haiku - http://haiku-os.org
GrafX2 project team - http://code.google.com/p/grafx2

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