[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 ?)

Right, IIRC the fdc code I wrote supports natively 2.88 format too,
which the R5 driver didn't, though I never tested it. It even supports
2 drives, but IIRC there are bugs when using both at once.

François.

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