HxC Floppy Drive Emulator

[Ricoche]

Hello Miro,

I've had my eye on the HxC Floppy Drive Emulator as a possible drive replacement and "boot" solution for the Roland W-30 and/or S-330.  You can see more info here:  http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html#SDCARDFloppyemulator

The developers claim this works for the Roland S-50.  It also supports Shugart based drives.  It works on the Korg DSS-1, Emulator I&II, and on the SP1200 as well.  After reading the info it really looks like it could work on the Roland W30.

I'm curious about your thoughts.  I'm thinking of buying one to test out, but thought I would ask in case you might know anything that would prevent this from working.  What do you think?  Might work?

Thanks!

Jim

[miro]

Hi Jim,

sorry for late reply . I must say that this looks quite nice but with the limitations that W30 already has we really need solution to emulate HD. I am currently in contact with Micha Bauerle which made complete SCSI - PCMCIA CF card reader (http://micha.freeshell.org/pcmcia_drive/index.php). He will send me a board soon so I can test it. Great is that I can tweak the firmware to hopefully emulate behaviour of for example my old QuantumPro 80S hdd which works with W30 seamlessly. In any case I will keep you all posted about the progress.

cheers

Miro 

[miro]

Hey guys,

Michael was so kind to send me the PCB for his pcmcia drive so I will be buying components and soldering  soon  . I hope to have working drive in some 2 months if everything goes well . Then there is task of debugging it with W30 to see if we can make this thing to boot with our dear W30.

I'll keep you posted

regards

Miro

[Ricoche]

This is great news.  This is the second of my "major" issues with the Roland W30.  The first was the importing of WAV files which your SMFW30 fixes.  Having a reliable boot/storage hardware replacement for the Roland W30 is something that I think is really keeping the both the value and interest in these samplers low.  It would be great to finally have some sort of workaround or solution for this.  Thanks and please keep us updated.