Whatever happened to reading emu sp1200 files. Is there a certain type of floppy that only works. I viewed the YouTube that showed the modified floppy drive. There was not any direction on brand to buy to make it happen. I bought a cheap one (the only one I could find). The updated manual has nothing except it reads a Hfe file from sd. Is this the answer? I thought this was a major feature, has this now been forgotten? wigo? Sorry for asking questions that may have been answered but my search on topic here in forum shows limited information. I just need some guidance if this is possible. That’s the only reason I bought this.
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There was a discussion about this not too long ago. Check this post: SP1200 Conversion Floppy Disc Drive
TLDR: nothing official yet, but there are external solutions for reading floppy discs and extracting .hfe images.
Thank you for that. So this was a marketing strategy? wow
I don’t think this was necessarily a marketing miscommunication. The S2400 does indeed read S2400 floppy images (I know because it worked for me), but I don’t think anyone ever said the S2400 will read physical floppy discs directly with or without a USB drive. That simply wouldn’t be possible because old floppy drives use specific microcontrollers that were common back in the day when the SP1200 was produced, but no longer made now. The linked video in the other post even explains that a new USB floppy drive had to be custom modified to extract old SP1200 floppy data. I may have missed something on my end but that’s my understanding of the situation.
FWIW the new SP1200 reissue also doesn’t read floppy discs directly, but it does load .hfe files from original SP1200 discs just like the S2400. I think your best bet is to find an old PC from the late 90s/early 2000s with a built-in floppy drive, windows XP and omniflop software to convert physical floppy disc data to .hfe files.
The modified drive is a product that they are planning on offering eventually. Brad has stated a few times that it’s not a major priority at the moment to manufacture and start selling them because it most likely won’t make very much money, because it’s a niche market. I’m sure they will open pre orders for those eventually, since it seemed to be mostly functional for SP1200 purposes. At the moment I think they just have too many things in the pipeline to focus on that.
My sp12 uses an old commodore floppy drive to read from. It can take 10-15 minutes to load. Another option is conversion using a dpx-1 to at least get to 3 1/4" disks. Chicken sys translatir is working on conversion software in the next update, or at least for akai s900 and dss1 files