Hello,

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I'm trying to read the floppy 08510-10034 "8510 Calibration Data". The floppy is formatted as a double density (not high density) and I have dumped its contents onto a USB stick and try to have my 8510C read it using the FlashFloppy emulator.

The VNA complains that the format is wrong and doesn't read.?

Letting the VNA read the floppy with a physical drive works well.

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Reading and writing high density floppies (images on a USB stick) seems to work, but initializing a floppy in the emulator is a different story.

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Anyone has any experience with these issues using FlashFloppy or any other emulator??

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Regards,

?Staffan

True. My hope is that someone already figured out the parameters for DD floppies (600k). I have really tried to set the parameters to mimic what I see when doing a raw read from the real floppy, but something is off.?

Similar for the HD when trying to format (init). I set parameters so that I see the same data stream from the emulator as when reading the physical floppy (initialized by the 8510), but still some error.?

Seems like there is something that I miss when inspecting the raw stream, but unclear what.?

Regards,

?Staffan

Not sure what you mean??
I’m looking for parameters of the LIF floppies used in the HP8510.?

The real 3.5” disks are nice, but I have too many with read errors so having it all on a USB stick is really great.?

…but I need to be able to initialize images and read DD disks.?

Regards

?Staffan

Hi Staffan,

Hi Staffan,

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what if you copy the floppy with a real floppy drive inside the 8510 to a GPIB drive attached to the 8510 and then copy it back from there to the GOTEK?

Then the 8510 should at least be able to read the proper data from the GOTEK and you may be able to analyze what is different from your original setting.

Btw, I have configured an old WinXP machine to serve as GPIB drive, quite handy.

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Best regards,

Tom

Hello,

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Thanks for the suggestions!

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Tom: I don't have a GPIB based floppy drive, but I believe the method only shifts the problem one step? Maybe I'm missing something?

I have (I believe I have) images of floppies that I have dumped using an Arduino. When reading these images from a floppy emulator (FlashFloppy, Keir Fraser, v 3.39) I the same dump as when reading the real floppy.?

When running FlashFloppy as the drive in the HP8510C, the HD disks (1232 kB) work to read and write, but the DD disks (616 kB) are just refused although the real floppy is read without problem when a physical drive is installed.

Although I can read and write into the image of the HD floppy, the HP8510C refuses to initialize the HD image. It tries to access tracks up to 79, which is 'outside' the normal image, but even with a huge image (160 tracks...), init won't work.

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Denys: Thanks for setting up the repository! I have some images that may be of interest. However, I can't read the .hfe files (images). Mine (.img) are exactly the size of the floppy data content and is basically a raw dump, but the .hfe files you have seem to be different. You are using FlashFloppy 3.41 whereas I run 3.39 - could this be the reason or how should one interpret the .hfe files?

I'm also looking for the IMG.CFG - would be great if you could add that. Do you know of a format for the DS DD (6126 kB) floppy??

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Regards,

? Staffan