[Video] New Falcon auto-byte-swapping IDE adapter (enhanced twisted cable)

[Badwolf]

Thank you for sharing your project!

Looks a beaut!

Many thanks!

BW

[Steve]

@leonk could you briefly describe the way you have the SD card partitioned? When you say 'moving files onto my falcon' does that mean one of the partitions on the SD card is in windows compatible? And the rest are regular TOS BGM? Does just the windows compatible partition show up on insertion to the PC?

[leonk]

@Steve as per maker's YT video explaining how to use this, one plugs a fresh CF/SD card into the Falcon. You then use HDDriver to partition (format) the flash card with Windows and TOS compatibility ON but byte swapping OFF (don't enable software byte swapping which disables ability of making the flash card bootable)

Then, when you put the flash card into Windows / MacOS, all the partitions show up and you move files to them. Plug the SD card back into Falcon and it's all there as well. Fastest way to get files on the flash card all thanks to the hardware byte swapper + HD Driver.

In my case, the 8GB SD is split into 8 1GB partitions and all 8 show up under MacOS.

[Steve]

Oh so you can have tos/windows compatible on C:\ & retain bootability as long as software byte-swapping is off? Ok that's great, I somehow missed that before and was always scratching my head about it.

[mikro]

@Steve I'm surprised this is news for you, Storm's smartswap mode allows you to do exactly the same. Personally I don't have use for it, I usually just mount the card in Hatari/Aranym so I can directly test things I have just written there.

[Steve]

@mikro No the whole concept kept getting me very confused. Also my pre-existing TT/Falcon CF's aren't partitioned in windows compatible mode - and I haven't been able to think of an easy way to be able to convert it all without losing my data. Any method I can think of usually involves hours and hours of tinkering and transferring.

[mikro]

Any method I can think of usually involves hours and hours of tinkering and transferring.

What I did just recently (for a different purpose) was that I made an image of my SD card using 'dd', then partitioned it under Hatari as IDE0, installed HD Driver there, mounted my SD card as IDE1, copied whole partitions by simple drag&drop from IDE1 to IDE0 and then wrote IDE0 back to SD card again using 'dd'.

The only thing which requires special attention is the AUTO folder, there you have to go to Desktop settings, set to unsorted and copy old AUTO to new AUTO manually.

[leonk]

@mikro No the whole concept kept getting me very confused. Also my pre-existing TT/Falcon CF's aren't partitioned in windows compatible mode - and I haven't been able to think of an easy way to be able to convert it all without losing my data. Any method I can think of usually involves hours and hours of tinkering and transferring.

The adapter has 2 ports. You can mount another SD/CF adapter on the slave port and copy the data over after you partition a new SD/CF cart with Windows/TOS compatibility on. After the copy is complete, just swap the cards. What you'll gain is full SD/CF access in Windows/MacOS to quickly load, tweak, backup your flash card. All this with no performance impact you get from software byte swapping. You also don't need any 3rd party software (like Hatari) The flash card will show up like any other external drive.

If you're good with SMD soldering and able to program FPGA/CPLD's .. this is a fun project.