SD hxC Floppy emulation... boot from SD?

[Cooljerk]

Hiya,
a bunch of my old Amiga floppies are failing, and while I have a CF kit installed in my A1200 (actually a CD32 with an SX-1 installed), I'm looking to back my floppies up onto a different medium which behaves more like the original. Hence, I've begun to look into SD HxC floppy emulation. As far as I understand it, these devices will allow an SD card to behave like a floppy disk, correct?

A few questions I have before I actually purchase one of these:

-Can you boot from SD? I.E. Can I back up Turrican 2 to an SD card, then pop in the SD card like it was a floppy and boot directly from it?

-Can I write a floppy image file to an SD card? A few of my games have already failed (like Lotus II), and, despite having WHD load installed on my Amiga, I've also got the disk images and want to know if I can write them back to an SD card

-Aside from having to swap disks, is there any major draw backs to using SD cards over a CF Kit? Ideally, I want to take my amiga floppies when I'm done, wrap them in some non-static plastic, and retire them to their boxes so they never have to be used again, and I can just use SD cards, burned self-booting CD versions of games, or CF cards from here on out to preserve my collection.

[Arnie]

The HXC uses an SD card to store floppy disk images. You then use the menu to select an image to either boot from or show on the Workbench.

You cannot write images to the SD card, it's for storage only.

You cannot run WHDLoad games from the SD card with HXC.

[alexh]

Yes.
Yes.
The HxC uses the floppy interface which is slower than IDE which CF uses. But you CAN use whdload from it. But you'd be mad to try. CF is so cheap. Use both

[Jeff_HxC2001]

Originally Posted by Arnie

You cannot write images to the SD card, it's for storage only.

? ?

Sure you can. But not sure to understand you correctly

[Arnie]

Originally Posted by Jeff_HxC2001

? ?

Sure you can. But not sure to understand you correctly

I understood that CoolJerk wanted to write back a floppy image to the SD card and use the HXC to treat it as a floppy disk, which I thought wouldn't work.

So will it work?

@Alexh

Can the HXC really run WHDLoad games?

[Vot]

If you want o backup protected floppies get a kryoflux it can backup anything. Make an ipf and use that with the hxc floppy.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Arnie

@Alexh
Can the HXC really run WHDLoad games?

Yes. AFAIK can be configured as a "Supersized" floppy disk and have Workbench, WHDload and WHDload games on it.

However it is limited to the Paula FDD speed of about 20 Kbyte/s. Compare that to an Amiga's PIO mode 0 which would be 1300 Kbyte/s

In the Atari community they created a new bit of software to do this in a different way :

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/181...rive-emulator/

[desiv]

Originally Posted by alexh

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/181...rive-emulator/

Interesting... Great for the ST..

I was asking Jeff about this a while ago (long while) and he didn't think so at the time...
(Then again, I was asking him about writable Amiga support WAY back and he said no.. And then got that working...)

Would be really interesting to see if that works on the Amiga...

Might be the thing that makes me pull the trigger on one of these.....

Thanx,

desiv