FDI and MDI Drivers

Martin Head has now made available an FDI (floppy disk image) driver utility to go with the MDI (microdrive image) driver. Here are the descriptions from my website:

MDI Driver (279K download) – a device driver for emulating the microdrive cartridges as used in the Sinclair QL, as a file stored on another device. Specifically developed for use with QPC2, but should work with most emulators. Since QL compatible systems generally have no microdrives, this lets you use saved microdrive images on emulators. Includes images of Quill, Archive, Abacus and Easel. To create your own images of microdrives, you will need a real QL with working microdrives and read the text file “Creating_Images_txt” supplied to see which program to use and how to go about it. Apparently even microdrive ‘random number’ finger prints are copied, allowing even some protected older programs to be run! The driver lets you load and save from/to these microdrive images.

FDI Driver (330K download) – for running floppy disk images on QL systems and emulators. Works on level 1 DSDD 720k and DSSD 360k disk images (no support for HD or ED disks and no support for level 2 directories) to allow simple straightforward copies of disk software to be run. Includes a program written in BASIC to make the raw images on a QDOS system with a floppy drive, or you can use ‘raw’ disk images created with software such as EMT4WIN for Windows, plus a program to make (‘format’) blank disk images, sample blank 360K and 720K disk images, plus a demo image of Xchange.

Download from http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/utils/index.html