Dragon 64 meets HxC 2001 Floppy Emulator

HxC 2001 Floppy Emulator (SD-Card type)

I was fiddling about the other day with some old tech, or more precisely my ancient Dragon 64 (very similar to the Tandy Color Computer), and became quite alarmed to discover that some of my old 5.25" floppy discs that I use with the machine have ceased to function. I guess this is just down to the floppy's deteriorating magnetic properties? As I still have loads of data in that format that I want to keep (I developed full “geekness” early on) I thought I must try to preserve what I have before everything just fades away...

There are a number of ways to preserve data on obsolete machines but I chose to use the HxC 2001 floppy emulator - catchy title huh? What this clever device does is mimic virtually any 34-pin floppy disc drive. The version I decided to use stores the data on a standard SD card. As the files are so small from 8-bit computers one SD card is really all you need. The SD card needs to be configured for your particular computer/operating system before you can use it in the emulator. This is pretty straightforward to do and means that the emulator can be used with a wide variety of old tech.

Once I had configured my SD card I hooked the emulator up to my Dragon 64's DOS. On a Dragon this is cartridge-based but provides the standard 34-pin connector to the floppy drive on the end. Initially, I set the jumper cables so that the emulator operated as the second drive leaving the original Dragon Disc Drive as the primary drive. By doing this I was able to use the Dragon's "BACKUP" command to simply copy all of my working 5.25" floppies to the emulator with ease. However, this is not a fast operation! It took me the best part of three days to complete the process! After this had been done I reconfigured the emulator as the primary drive. Job done!

I now have my entire Dragon software collection (about 30 5.25" discs) on one 1GB SD card! The whole thing is also backed-up on my Windows PC. The advantages are that there is no longer any creaky mechanical hardware liable to break or floppies to fail. One other useful side effect is that I now have floppy images on my PC that I can use with a Dragon 32/64 emulator program on a Windows PC should I wish.

All in all, a very clever piece of technology and well worth the money for any retro-computer fan worried about keeping the aging system going. I thoroughly recommend it!



HxC 2001 connected to my Dragon 64 as the secondary drive and powered by a standard PC PSU. Bottom right is the original Dragon Data Disc Drive.



The finished article: Dragon 64 and HxC 2001 Floppy Emulator.

Just to prove that it works...

For more information on the HxC 2001 please visit:

Information from the designer of the HxC 2001

Purchasing information on the HxC 2001

 

Minidisc to cease production...

Sony MZ-RH1 & "Bit Club" designer MD

Well, I guess it was going to happen at some point? I'm sad to report that yet another physical music medium bites the dust! This time around its Minidisc's (MD) turn...

Although I was a relative late-comer to MD (I got my first recorder in 1997) I can honestly say that I thought it was a superb recording format. Many people derided the lack of pre-recorded material available but to me this rather missed the whole point of MD. Why would you buy a pre-recorded disc when the CD was cheaper and you could copy that on to a blank MD anyway? Most MD fans (of which I count myself as one) appreciated the excellent sound quality, particularly when used for live recordings. Indeed, many radio stations still use the format for field recordings etc.

Unfortunately, MD got a bad press pretty early on in its life due to the price of discs and Sony's worry of copying copyrighted material. However, as MD developed things improved; discs got cheaper, players/recorders got better features and then along came "NET-MD" which allowed you to connect the recorders to a PC for quick transfer. Finally Hi-MD arrived. If this had come out earlier in MD's life things might have been different as it had many of the features that people had been crying out for. PCM (“wave”) recording, no annoying copy protection, 1GB of storage on Hi-MD discs were among the new features. Sadly, it was all a bit too late.

Even now in the MP3-era it’s still a great tool for live recordings which is what I use my equipment for. I've looked at "flash" memory recorders but currently they are still pricey and don't have a lot of the features a cheap, portable MD recorder has. For example; most don't support optical digital (SPDIF) input. I'm sure that these features will eventually arrive, but for the moment at least, I'm sticking with MD...

Some of us have large Minidisc collections...

Home recorder decks were of a very high quality.
This is my Sony MDS-JB940

The oddity that is the Sphinx SK1...

So, what do we have here then? Well, this is something I discovered way back in May 1989! Its a one-off special called the "Sphinx SK1". It was manufactured in the UK around 1973-1974, and according to the owner at the time, was originally meant to be used for hillclimb racing. It really was one of the most unique vehicles I have ever seen...
Whilst talking to the owner it was described as having a "diamond chassis". On closer examination, what he meant was that the chassis was a spaceframe in the shape of a diamond... Looking at the photos you will see that it is very narrow at the front. I had initially thought it was a three-wheeler, but this was not the case. Unbelievably, there was one steerable wheel at the front, two driven wheels in the centre and one steerable wheel at the rear! The steerable wheels were connected by a very complicated set of rose-jointed rods and turned in opposite directions to each other at all times! How this would make the car handle in anything other than a straight line is anyone's guess - and quite possibly lethal!
The body was hand-made from aluminium and featured gull-wing doors with plexiglass side windows. The windscreen was a glass item from an unknown donor car. I don't think it would have been slow either as it had a mid-mounted tuned 1750cc engine most likely from a BMC Maxi complete with subframe. The rear "ban the bomb" lights are from a MK1 Ford Cortina but most other parts were BMC in origin.
As this car was made from all new parts it was given a new registration mark which meant (at the time at least) that it didn't need any govenment test to be put on the road. This was a peculiarity of British law at the time. This was also fortunate, as it had no parking brake whatsoever, meaning it would never have passed a test in the first place! I suspect that after the obligatory MOT (Ministry of Transport Test) was required some three years later it was taken off the road. A bit of a shame really, as it clearly would have cost a lot of time and money to build...

Sony Cassette Walkman R.I.P

Oh dear, it’s come to this; the Sony Cassette Walkman passed away quietly on the 22nd October 2010. It had been ill for quite some time, death row you might say, but I for one will miss it. Sure, if you are under the age of about 30 you probably just won't understand, but before the Walkman, personal, portable, music simply did not exist. It was either a ghetto blaster or a transistor radio jammed up against your ear. Put simply, it was a revelation. It may seem clunky now but it was cutting-edge stuff back in 1979 I can tell you. In fact, what really made the Walkman usable was not the cassette player itself but the headphones that came with it. Before the TPS-L2 (the original designation for the Walkman/Soundabout/Stowaway) headphones were truly enormous and massively heavy - I know, I've still got a pair! With the new MDR-3L2 you could do things like, walk or even run without them falling off - unthinkable before!

As with all things, technology has moved on and most of us now no longer use cassettes. I remember seeing someone on holiday last year still using a cassette Walkman. They were viewed by most people as being rather eccentric. However, they did have a very good reason for owning and using one; the lady in question was listening to an audio book and had unfortunately lost her sight. This of course did not stop her operating a cassette Walkman. It would, however, stop her from using an MP3 player or iPod...

This is my own TPS-L2. Before Sony decided to use the Walkman name they experimented with a couple of others; "Soundabout" and "Stowaway". It even came with a demo Sony Mix Tape! Ever since I got my Walkman/Stowaway I have loved Hideki Matsutake and KI Capsule's electronic version of "Diamonds Are Forever"!

Download Hideki Matsutake and KI Capsule here