That probably depends to the floppy drive. I have not researched it, but my suspicion is that USB floppy drives would present themselves as USB block storage devices, i.e. with a block size, LBA addressing and the appropriate command set and are likely to be restricted to 512-byte sectors and IBM PC floppy formats.How hard would it be to add USB Floppy Disk support to B-Em so that it could read and write real beeb floppy disks ?
I know there was software from the DOS days to read/write arbitrary floppy formats from a PC, though that may be limited to MFM in hardware as some interfaces had that line into the FDC permanently active. Linux also allowed the parameters for the floppy drive to be changed but I think I read of that now being withdrawn, presumably as floppies in which the FDC is addressable from the main CPU and not at the end of a USB interface have become much less common.
Reading and writing BBC Micro format floppies could probably be done from an emulator with the use of a greaseweazel. That is probably a fair chunk of work - it rather depends if the greaseweazel project has a library that does much of the work.
Statistics: Posted by Coeus — Tue Dec 03, 2024 2:21 pm