exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I swear I looked through every thread with the word "SidecarTridge" in it and can't find the answer here.

Can you use Floppy drive emulation AND hard disk emulation at the same time. So say I've booted the ST with the active app being the "drives emulator" and say I've set up a C drive as a hard drive, in GEM can I see/read/write to the virtual hard disc and boot floppies i.e. A, B, C virtual drives are all active?

As a side question to the above, how then does it view the actual internal floppy drive or does it disable that whilst the SidecarT emulated drive is being used?

And a third question can I do TOS emulation concurrently with the FDD emulation? So say I want to boot with TOS 2.06 can I do that and use the FDD emulator in SidecarT at the same time?

****EDIT*** reason i'm asking here is because I can't find that info on the official website for SidecarT

Just in-case nobody here knows the answers to your questions, I would send an e-mail to their support: support [AT] gooddatalabs.com

As far as I remember, TOS emulator is a separate device, mounted inside in ROM sockets, and HDD/FDD emulation is done by an external device mounted in CART port

Chati Garcia kindly gave me a lot of great info in the following email as follows which explains it all nicely:

1) Floppy and hard disk at the same time: yes. Both live inside one
app, the Drives Emulator. While it runs it gives you a GEMDrive hard
disk (your C:) alongside emulated floppy drives A: and B:, so from GEM
you can read and write the virtual hard disk and boot or use the
floppy images in the same session. You configure each drive in the
app's setup screen, which appears for about 5 seconds on power-on.
On top of the classic GEMDrive (which maps a microSD folder as a
drive), a newer option lets you mount a full raw hard disk image at
the block level over ACSI. That image carries its own partition table
with up to 14 FAT16 partitions from C: to P:, so it behaves like a
real Atari hard disk instead of a folder. It is still marked
experimental and is off by default, and it has been tested from TOS
1.04 to 2.06 (not EmuTOS yet), so GEMDrive stays the safe default
while you settle in.
Docs: https://emea01.safelinks.protection.out ... reserved=0
ACSI image emulation:
https://emea01.safelinks.protection.out ... reserved=0

2) The internal floppy drive A:. It is not disabled, it is remapped.
The emulated drives take the low slots first, so when you emulate A:
your machine's physical internal drive moves to B:. If you also
emulate B:, both floppy slots are then held by emulated images and the
physical internal drive is no longer addressable. So the rule is
straightforward: emulate only A: and you keep your real drive as B:;
emulate A: and B: together and the physical drive drops out. You mount
and unmount images from the setup screen (SHIFT+A releases A:, SHIFT+B
releases B:), and drive A: can hold up to 10 images that you cycle at
runtime with a short press of the SELECT button.
Docs: https://emea01.safelinks.protection.out ... reserved=0

3) TOS emulation on the Multi-device: no, and it is worth explaining
why. The Multi-device sits on the cartridge port and emulates a
cartridge ROM, so it only answers to the address range and ROM size
that the cartridge port exposes. That has nothing to do with where and
how the machine reads its own TOS ROM. Bit-banging the TOS image from
the cartridge port is physically impossible, which is precisely why
replacing TOS is a separate product, the SidecarTridge TOS Emulator,
that sits in the ROM socket itself.
TOS Emulator product:
https://emea01.safelinks.protection.out ... reserved=0

4) How the apps fit together. The Multi-device does not run one fixed
firmware. It runs small interchangeable programs called microfirmwares
that you pick from the Booster menu. Whichever one you launch (for
example the Drives Emulator or the ROM Emulator) takes over the
cartridge port while it is active. Only one app runs at any given
time, so you swap between them from the Booster menu rather than
stacking them. That is why the drive emulation and a ROM app are used
one at a time, not together in the same session.
App catalog: https://emea01.safelinks.protection.out ... reserved=0