November 15, 2006 You Broke the Support Board 08:59 PM All those posts finally blew a gasket. :p Yoda: Seth break the Support Board? It’s not loading for me. Brandon: s1 is broken Yoda: how long til it unbreaks Brandon:a few hours minimum Ah the chaos that ensues afterwards should be interesting. And of course: NO we are not Upgrading to Zetaboards. The Server’s got a problem. Personally, I blame Seth. :p

 

The s1 server is the original and main Invisionfree server, and classicamiga's forum runs from the original s1 server as we created the forum whilst InvisionFree was in beta testing so have been with them since the start.

 

The s1 server being down also means it has brought down their own support Invisionfree site and support forums too, hence the "chaos that ensues" quote above.

 

Lets hope they can get it back up and running as soon as possible.

 

Update:  The forum is now showing the message "This domain is not setup for an invisionfree board".  This message is also displaying for all other invisionfree boards including the main support one so it seems to be a generic message. 

 

As you can see, the floppy drive has been replaced by some piece of hardware. This piece of hardware features an USB connection to a PC. On the PC side, just run the Floppy drive emulator software and drag/drop your favorite disk image file. Then just use your beloved computer as usual (no hardware of software modification of any kind, apart from the floppy drive replacement is needed), and feel the magic !

It means that you can run all your Atari and Amiga software on the real machines, without the hassle of keeping your old floppy disks, and experience floppy drives failures.

Here is basically how it works : the PC software loads the disk image files (.ST, .MSA, .ADF, .DMS...), and convert track data to MFM format (the physical way the data is stored on a floppy disk). Then the hardware part decodes the floppy drive logic, and retrieves from the PC the MFM flow into SRAM buffers. Those buffers are then sent to the target computer.

The first version of the system used 74-series chips and SRAM, and the parallel port of the PC. On the second version, most of the logic has been replaced by an Altera CPLD, and a FTDI USB module has been used to replace the parallel port.

For more information, I suggest that you go to Jeff's pages about his project (Warning, those pages are in French language).