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