Vfloppy

Vfloppy is a disk emulator for the Epson PX-4 and PX-8. It uses the epsp protocol used by the Epson TF-20, PF-10 and compatible disk stations. It is written in C for Linux, and should be portable to any *nix with standard libraries. With the cygwin package even a Windows version is possible.

Currently three versions are available:

• Version 1.0 written by Justin Mitchell and friends in 1996. The original is at Justin's ftp site
• Version 1.1 adding PX-8 support
• Version 1.2 adding a image read utility
• Version 1.3 adding a image write utility.
  Due to a disk crash, some functionality may be lost, including bug fixes. Not a new bug, but recently discovered: saving files larger than 16 kByte does not work properly. See doc/bugs.txt for more info.
• Version 1.4 a redesigned command line interface and more debug options. I forgot why this was commented out, made it soon after the 1.3 version. Try at your own risk (but this is true of all versions :-))
• Extra images for the PX-4/PX-8 (doc included).

To compile vfloppy and utilities on a modern Linux system (Kubuntu 6.06 Desktop on a AMD-64), I had to make some minor changes:

• Change any occurrance of 'cc' in the Makefile into '$(CC)' (just like in the vfman/Makefile).
• Add a line '#include <errno.h>' to vfman/vf.c.

All versions are placed under the GPL. An exception are the files in the images. These may be copyrighted by Epson, DRI or others, and probably not GPL.

More info on the EPSP:

• Epson Serial Protocol
• HX-20 Technical Software Manual chapter 10-11 or HX-20 Technical Software Manual chapter 10-11

Latest update: 2006-08-13

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