CFFA and 5.25" physical drive on a IIgs

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CFFA and 5.25" physical drive on a IIgs

Does anyone know how to have both the CFFA's Disk II emulation work and have a physical 5.25" drive on IIgs? Is this even possible?

I have a IIgs with two physical drives -- one 3.5", and the other 5.25". When plugged into the disk port on the back, the 3.5" appears to work just fine (presumably because it reads as slot 5) but for the life of me, I can't get the CFFA's Disk II mode to work with both it and the physical 5.25" drive I have. 

I'm guessing it's because the IIgs still treats a 5.25" drive like slot 6, and since the CFFA is already emulating two drives as a Disk II controller in slot 6, it can't add any more drives to the chain. 

 

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The CFFA3000 can emulate Disl

The CFFA3000 can emulate Disk ][ in any empty slot. So just set it up to emulate Disk ][ in a slot different than slot 5 or slot 6 and different than the one that it's actually in.

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CVT wrote:The CFFA3000 can
CVT wrote:

The CFFA3000 can emulate Disk ][ in any empty slot. So just set it up to emulate Disk ][ in a slot different than slot 5 or slot 6 and different than the one that it's actually in.

Well, y'see...

That's the other thing. The CFFA is in slot 7, handling the job of being a hard drive, too. Slot 6, obviously, would be the 5.25" drive. Slot 5 would be the 3.5" drive. Slot 4 is the mouse port, which I suppose I could switch over to the CFFA, but there's also an Uthernet II in slot 4, per the recommendation of Ewan Wannop in the Marinetti Link Layer manuals. I could move the Uthernet to slot 3, but would I then lose mouse access in GS/OS with slot 4 set to "Your Card"? 

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Well, unfortunately the

Well, unfortunately the CFFA3000 needs two free slots: one for itself and one for its imaginary friend. No two ways about that.

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Right -- I knew that, but my

Right -- I knew that, but my question was, if I set the Disk II emulation to slot 4, do I then lose the mouse in GS/OS?

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Yes, I certainly did. Think

Yes, I certainly did.

 

Think of it like this, you can run DOS or ProDOS.

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Nah, when you have a CFFA3000

Nah, when you have a CFFA3000 card there isn't a situation when you would need both a 5¼" and a 3½" drive at the same time. You can always connect one or the other and transfer diskettes to disk images.

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I have a MicroDrive/Turbo and

I have a MicroDrive/Turbo and a Floppy 5.25" drive.

The answer was to put the MicroDrive in Slot 2.  Slot 2 was the only "slot" left for me.  Slot 7 was taken up by AppleTalk activity due to having an Utnernet II card in slot 4.

You can't set slot 4 to "your card", nor can you set slot 3 to "your card" without removing functionality - in this case the mouse and 80 column capability, respectively.

But since I don't have a modem connected to the modem port (I use the Uthernet II card and Spectrum to do my BBSing) slot 2 became expendable.  

Slot 1 is still reserved for serial port (be it printer or physical modem) activity, should the need arise.

 

Similarly, you could put the virtual slot for the virtual floppy into slot 2 if you want to keep the physical floppy and 3.5" floppy connected to the smartport.

The caveat here is that any disk image that requires disk access in slot 6 will kakk out.

I guess you cna't have your cake and eat it too.

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The CFFA's firmware won't let

The CFFA's firmware won't let me assign the virtual floppy slot to any slot lower than 4, so that's one thing in the way -- however, what I was hoping to be able to do was to take physical floppies and make images of them with the CFFA. It's looking like I'm stuck swapping hardware in and out for anything involving 5.25" disks.

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mabalmer wrote:The CFFA's
mabalmer wrote:

The CFFA's firmware won't let me assign the virtual floppy slot to any slot lower than 4...

 

It's not letting you to choose any slot from the menu??? What version of the CFFA card do you have and what's the version of the firmware that it's running?

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