wDrive
What is wDrive?
It is a 5.25” floppy drive emulator for
apple disk ii. In the past, most of the commercial diskettes were protected.
They are difficult to duplicate. Although many of them were cracked and their
images can be used by floppy disk emulators now a day, protected diskettes
still exist and many of them were imaged. We can found many protected diskette
images in woz, edd and nib format.
The main aim of develop this device is to
support protected disk images.
Background
Start from
support nib which is the easiest format to implement in the emulator. Of
course, this format only preserves little characteristic of diskette, even the
sync bytes were lost. Only light copy protected image can use by the emulator.
To step forward, we developed edf format which is converted from edd and
inherited features of edd format. Use
this format, many protect schemes can be supported by this emulator. Until woz
was introduced, it preserve more diskette’s characteristics than edd ( not sure
if it preserve all diskette’s characteristics), we are very close to the
target.
Feature
l Support Apple II 5.25”floppy disk image format in nib, edf, dsk, do, po
and woz(1.0 and 2.0).
l Support
13-sector disk images, press ‘LEFT’ button once when booting 13-sector images.
l Support 32M,
800k 2mg/ hdv images for smartport interface.
l Support softSP,
it is a software driver to implement smartport protocol so that Apple II machines without smartport interface can use smartport device through Disk II interface.
l Support SD, SDHC
and SDXC memory card.
l SD card File system use Fat16/Fat32.
l Integrate tools to write floppy disk from disk images(protected, non-protected)
