You don not have to replace the internal drives, just use the MD port on the side of (each) QLDave wrote:Given the limitations of microdrives, if you're replacing the hardware that sits in the microdrive bays ANYWAY, why not use a floppy driver-based system? Given the extra simplicity and reliability, and roughly equal cost, it's an easier development path.
This is a cool project though.
No further power supply is necessary. At minimum a reasonably fast microcontroller, a SD card and a voltage regulator is all it needs. It just needs some clever programming of the driver. The bandwidth of the MD port is quite good if only you could select distinctive sectors which is entirely feasible once you can send specific commands.
The driver should be able to read the directory and file attributes (especially file size) send the wanted filename and read for as many sectors as the file is long. The MD emulator should open the file on the sdcard and keep on sending sectors for as long as the QL keeps the emulated MD device selected. The whole FAT filesystem management is done on the emulator side.
Just wondering: And I will have to dive into the QL sources to see if maybe the QL can be tricked into 'keep on reading'. But maybe by manipulating the sector number on the fly it will load files larger than the maximum number of MD sectors.