www.virtualacorn.co.uk/forum

I'm not sure whether I'm just being thick with this, or whether it's a limitation with version 1.4 of Virtual Acorn so please bear with me....
I've just upgraded to V1.4 and have installed the driver to allow direct access to Acorn discs via the PC's floppy drive - this works very well and is a great addidition to the software. However, I do have some Acorn floppy disc images on the hard drive of my PC which I created for use with previous versions of Virtual Acorn. As far as I can see, now that I have installed the direct disk access driver there is now no way for me to load disc images... I can still choose which disc image I wish to load as normal, but when I go into RISCOS and click on the floppy drive icon the drive on the PC starts and I get an error telling me that the drive is empty.
Does anyone know of a way around this?

Simply configure a 2nd RISC OS floppy drive from the
!Configure application (loaded by double clicking on
!Boot). This will give you two floppy drive icons.

:0 - will be connected to the PC floppy drive
:1 - will be connected to any image files you load

We don't think of everything but we did think about
this one.

Well put it this way it works fine here.

Aaron

Thanks Aaron! - obvious really... why didn't I think of that?

All working here now too

Whilst we are on the subject of floppy disc and VA 1.4 an
"undocumeted feature" appeatrde yesterday - where users
souldn't write to floppy discs (Protected disc error - even
on unprotected discs) and trying the format caused the floppy
drive to stop working.

A patch for these problems is now in the VirtualAcorn downloads
section of the website on the V 1.4 downloads page.

Hi, it's great to hear the news about the direct floppy disc access it was the one thing I was waiting for.

However theres one thing I want to know - will it read protected discs? I have a pile of Acorn games on disk i.e. Chocks Away, Nevryon etc that are on protected disks and what I would like to know is - can I run them with Virtual Acorn? Theres a freeware Arc emulator known as "Archie" that does and it even uses the ArcImg freeware program to do it - can Virtual Acorn do the same? I really can't use Archie it doesn't recognise my VGA chips and does some really wierd things with the screen display. I don't want to copy the discs I just want play the games that I havn't been able to since my A3000 expired many years ago.

If Virtual Acorn can do that then I'm buying it today!

Any help would be gratefully received

Virtual Acorn should be able to do almost anything an A5000 can do with its floppy drive so most, if not all, protected games which can be used on an A5000 should work on Virtual Acorn.

Some very early games will only work on RISC OS 2 and/or only with the disk controller in the early A300/400 models, these are unlikely to work with the current version of Virtual Acorn.

Be aware that some games write to their floppy and we can give no guarantee that Virtual Acorn will not damage your disks if they are not write protected

Graeme

Well I have to say that since I bought Virtual Acorn 1.4 the games I mentioned do not work which is very disappointing.

They do however work with Archie which uses the freeware ArcDisc as mentioned before so its not just a simple matter of disk controller incompatibility.