Mini vMac : Floppy Drive

Update: Mini vMac no longer requests pledges. Please do not pledge to this project.

Mini vMac emulates most of the hardware of the Macintosh Plus, but not the floppy drive. Instead the ROM is patched with a replacement disk driver. For this project I will improve emulation of the IWM chip, and emulate the floppy drive, so that Mini vMac will work without this or any other ROM patch, to help make the emulation as accurate as possible.

This would only be a compile time option, not the default, since very little Macintosh software would notice the difference, it would be much slower, and it would lose a lot of the features of Mini vMac. Such as mounting more than 2 disk images, using disk images of size other than 400K or 800K, and also the entire extension mechanism, so importing and exporting of files and the clipboard wouldn’t work. Sector file tags, an extra 12 bytes of information for each 512 byte sector, may not be completely supported, since there is no place to put them in the usual disk image format.

This project will likely require around a month or two of my time to complete. The project will be considered done when the implementation is available in a development source snapshot (on minivmac.sourceforge.net/develop/). It will later be included in the next official release.