Basically the ZETA SBC V2 (by Sergey Kiselev) with RomWBW (by Wayne Warthen) always has the 3.5 inch drive with 720KB or 1.440KB as default floppy drive. But why not connect a nice old 8" disk drive? I still have a NEC FD1165 in my drawer, out with it, it won't get better from lying there.
I have written a lot here for the operation of 8" floppy disk drives under DOS. Important are the power supply and the conversion from 35 pin to 50 pin. For this I use the FDADAP floppy disk adapter from dbit. Works very well.
Before you can use the ZETA V2 with another floppy drive, you have to rebuild the ROM and program it. For this, use in a GALEP-5, also works great.
There's not really much more to say. Wayne Warthen did a great job with RomWBW. I use (2019) RomWBW v2.9.2-pre15. The latest version (01/2023) is v3.0.1.
How to Prepare a Floppy Disk (C:) with RomWBW
... formatting ...
For this purpose use FDU.COM, change the settings to 8" drive, and then format.
The 8 inch floppy format is as follows: 77 tracks, 2 sides, 15 sectors per track and 512 bytes per sector. The drive rotates with 360 rpm like a 5.25" HD drive.
The floppy formats are actually just the transfer of the known DOS parameters to CP/M. Furthermore RomWBW uses only MFM and not FM, i.e. it always works with 512 bytes per sector.
... clear/prepare the directory ...
clrdir c:
confirm with capital „Y“ NOT „y“. Took me a while to figure it out!
Note: CLRDIR is not actually necessary for floppy disks, as this is done automatically in the course of formatting!
... make the floppy bootable ...
syscopy c:=cpm.sys (or zsys.sys)
Do NOT use SYSGEN like you are used to on real CP/M machines. Wayne Warten told me: "SYSGEN is kind of brain dead."
... work with the floppy ...
Do whatever you want: PIP, boot, ...
By the way
Instead of a real 8 inch drive you can also use a pure 1.2 MByte 5.25 inch drive with 360 RPM. To repeat: The 5.25 inch 1.2 MByte drive was designed among other things as a replacement for the 8 inch drive. All drive parameters are exactly the same, only the number of tracks was increased from 77 to 80.
I am using the M4854-342M from Mitsubishi. This works perfectly.
Easter-Egg
Well, there have been more difficult easter eggs to find!
External links
- Wayne Warthen:
- github.com / RomWBW
- github.com / ROM releases
- Sergey Kiselev
- Homepage / ZETA SBC V2