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 Post subject: Cannot use Floppy Drive
PostPosted: Sat May 09, 2009 4:18 pm 
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Joined: Sun Jun 19, 2005 1:05 pm
Posts: 18
Location: Warwickshire
Hello,

I have been looking forward to playing High Risc Racing all week, only problem is it needs disk 2 inserted to load the tracks. When I connect my external floppy drive into my iMac
with a DOS floppy or Acorn format disc in, VRPC just does not want to know. I need to be able to use my floppy drive, preferably without having to drag my PC out. Can I do this?

Alternatively, is there a way of imaging the HRR disk, most emulators use this system. While I am on the process of mounting things? I have heard that HostFS has been updated, is there a function to allow to specify drives before you load VRPC? As to be honest the method of doing it inside VRPC drives me crazy!

Any help with this problem is much appreciated, but for now it looks like back to the Windows VRPC for me :(


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 Post subject: Re: Cannot use Floppy Drive
PostPosted: Sat May 09, 2009 4:22 pm 
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Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2002 12:16 pm
Posts: 958
You won't be able to read an ADFS floppy disc using a Mac. You can read a DOS formatted floppy from an external USB drive under VirtualRPC (using MacPop). Newer VRPC's ship with MacPop pre-installed. For older VRPC's you can download a copy from the downloads section of the main VirtualAcorn website.


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 Post subject: Re: Cannot use Floppy Drive
PostPosted: Sat May 09, 2009 5:05 pm 
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Joined: Sun Jun 19, 2005 1:05 pm
Posts: 18
Location: Warwickshire
That is a shame, I wasn't aware of this issue before I bought VRPC for Mac. And it essentially means that all Acorn floppies that I and many others have ever owned are now off limits to certain variations of RIsc OS, very sad.

Is it not possible to image the Acorn disks at all?


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 Post subject: Re: Cannot use Floppy Drive
PostPosted: Sun May 10, 2009 11:30 am 
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Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2002 12:16 pm
Posts: 958
Since Macs don't have a floppy drive (and haven't for most of the last decade) they don't really make a good target platform if one of the aims is to read a lot of old Acorn format floppies. These can't be read on a USB floppy drive as Acorn discs have 1024 bytes per sector. USB floppy drives are fixed in hardware to only read discs with 512 bytes per sector. It isn't possible to alter this behaviour.

It does say on the table (on the products page of the main VirtualAcorn website) that VRPC for the Mac can't read floppies.

I have copied discs by using a VRPC (or a Red Squirrel) set up with an ADFS harddisc image file on a Windows machine to read the floppies. The files are then copied to the ADFS harddisc (IDEDisc4). Once finished this entire harddisc image file (Models/Arm710/harddisc.hdf) can be moved over and installed in the VirtualRPC for the Mac.


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