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Apple 2 Mac Emulator10/10/2021
I have recently acquired the wDrive, another emulator device which can simulate a Disk II drive. In a recent past blog article, I have written about the Floppy Emu, a very capable Disk II drive emulator. To use a disk image is to either write the image back to a disk, a cumbersome and sometimes unreliable process, or use a disk emulator. Using floppy disks, and more specifically disk images, is essential to using an Apple II computer. Thousands of software titles were written specifically for the Apple II's Disk II drive and its successors and clones.Woz format was specifically designed to handle Apple II protections and capture and retain the data required to make emulation pass the copy protection schemes Apple II programs used. Both are better than most other solutions because they support the. Great portion of the Apple II users.Both wDrive and Floppy Emu are the cream of the crop of floppy emulation or simulation devices for the real Apple IIs.Woz format, released in mid-2018 has gained a significant hold in the Apple II community. Edd format was released a few years ago in an effort to capture more information from the disks but it really did not gain significant traction.The. Nib format retained some of the disk's structure and copy copy protections would be satisfied with that, but far from all.
Woz format is a chunk file format which stores every track separately and contains the information necessary to properly recreate the disk's formatting and structure as though it was an original disk. Woz file suitable for software and hardware emulator use. Then the macOS-only Applesauce Client Software can convert the a2r files into a. This dump is made using the Applesauce hardware, which acts as an interface between a Disk II drive and a modern computer. Because the wDrive uses a full-size SD card, you can use the locking switch on the side of the SD card to enforce write protection on disk images regardless of whether the file is marked read-only or has the write protect field set in a woz file. The Floppy Emu comes as a bare board but there is a plastic acrylic enclosure available which you can build around the board and screen.The wDrive uses a full-size SD card with a spring loading mechanism whereas the Floppy Emu uses a microSD card without the spring loader. The wDrive is enclosed in a 3-D printed plastic enclosure, and this version is molded like an Apple 3.5" drive, which I found to be rather cute. Both displays use a fixed-width font, but the wDrive can show 32 characters on a line while Floppy Emu makes do with 21 characters. Both devices can display seven files or folders on the screen underneath the title bar. When compared side by side the wDrive is significantly smaller than the Floppy Emu.The OLED screen of the wDrive is about the same size as the Floppy Emu's. The status LED of the wDrive is red compared to the Floppy Emu's green. Also, if you press back and select at the same time the cursor will jump back to the beginning of the directory. While wDrive also suffers from a lack of directory wrap-around, if you hold down a navigation button your cursor will eventually accelerate. It can take a while to get from one end of a directory to another, especially as there is no directory wrap-around. If you hold down the Floppy Emu's buttons, the selector will move up or down the directory at a fixed pace. Both devices use microswitches with plastic buttons on top of them. Both devices come with 19-pin ribbon cables with IDC connectors on either end, which is ideal for the Disk II Controller Card but require adapters for the later controller card which used a D-shell 19-pin connector.Menu navigation has its quirks with both Floppy Emu and wDrive. Also, this delay in showing the contents of a directory only applies to directory with. However, wDrive is officially limited to no more than 100 files per directory. Floppy Emu can take up to two seconds to display the same number of files (95 or so) using an identical directory structure. The chief advantage for file browsing is that wDrive's ability to display files when a new directory is loaded is instant. As the Floppy Emu's buttons are raised, they make for an easier navigating experience because they are easier to press.But wDrive has one other advantage over Floppy Emu and one disadvantage with file browsing. You use the Apple II's Up/Down/Left/Right keys to navigate through the menu, Enter to select a directory or disk image and Esc to go back levels. If you put the file wdmain.dat, which is included in firmware zip file of that version and newer versions in the root of your SD card, you will be able to select a boot floppy disk image from your Apple II's screen. Dsk and similar format, the directory presentation is instantaneous (at least if you keep the number of files in a directory to 100 or less).As of wDrive firmware v1.0b2, things have changed remarkably. Hdv hard drive images, so it can do more than just simulate a 140KiB 5.25" floppy drive.Availability and support are firmly an issue where Floppy Emu prevails. WDrive can support 800KiB 3.5". Floppy Emu can support other kinds of floppy drives, including the 3.5" drives used by the Apple //gs, Apple //c+, Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh. Of course this only works for the boot disk, if you need to change disks as with a multi-disk game, you will still need to revert to the wDrive's buttons and display.Floppy Emu is more versatile in its stated ability to support floppy drives than wDrive. Apple 2 Emulator Manual Which GuidesThe wDrive's creator, Kboo, comes from Hong Kong and English is clearly not his first language. The documentation is also superior with a User Manual which guides you through the basics. Fortunately it came from Hong Kong in only two weeks.Being the more popular device, Floppy Emu has more attention from users. By the time I made up my mind to buy one, there were only 3 in stock. On a whim one day in early January I checked the site and saw there were 5 in stock of the OLED version. When I was building my Apple //e last September and October, wDrive was out of stock in all its variants. They require blank DOS 3.3 and ProDOS formatted disk images to use with programs which require a fresh data or save disk. Fortunately I was able to grab many of them from the last Wayback Machine cache of the site.One curious deficiency that both of these devices have is their inability to format a disk image. Right now, the blog posts which talk about the wDrive on the kboohk website are down, which deprives users of much information about the improvements of never firmware. Woz file and will show a padlock on the menu bar if the field is set to yes. WDrive and Floppy Emu respect the write protected info field in the. This limitation may not apply to wDrive with woz images.Both wDrive and Floppy Emu can write to. Floppy Emu's User Manual has a modification to use with COPYA to get programs copied without disks being formatted.
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