Roland S-5xx and S-7xx Floppy Disk to USB

[chris_intx]

Upgrade your Roland floppy drive to a new USB emulator drive!

This USB device pretends to be a drive with a blank floppy disk, that can be formatted in the Roland format and will produce an image file on your USB stick, for immediate backup or sharing!

Or, just copy a Roland image file to the USB stick and insert into the unit, and read away. That simple!

The device can be set to either 720kb or 1.44mb mode.

Compatible instruments are:
Roland S-50
Roland S-51
Roland S-330
Roland W-30
Roland S-500
Roland S-550

Roland S-70
Roland S-700
Roland S-750
Roland S-760
Roland S-770
Roland S-772


The link to the USB Floppy emulator is on the front page, PLR ELECTRONICS

When ordering, please specify model of machine.



Upgrade your Roland to USB capability, now!

[Melodius]

Hi Chris,

Greeting ! I am new to the forum, and it looks like you guys cover a wide palette of subjects. I noticed the post you had back in October 2010 regarding the older Roland sampler products. I own a Roland W-30 and found the USB emulator drive concept interesting !

What I wanted to know is could this USB emulator drive format a USB (Stick) drive in a way that allows the USB drive to be used for mass storage ?

For example, could multiple image files be stored on the USB drive and individually selected for load up (Kind of like the Roland W-30's SCSI Option allows for mass storage of multiple files) ?

Can the USB drive be formatted into a boot system disk ?

Finally, (Important) there is a special system disk that is used for a Roland W-30 when using the SCSI interface option. If that system disk is copied to the USB drive and used to boot the W-30, would it allow the USB emulator drive to format a USB (Stick) drive to the full 80 MB capacity of a SCSI interface drive ?

Thanks,

[chris_intx]

Welcome,



We currently have/are working on several solutions for multiple disks on USB, which I will explain. The SCSI is a likely no, but I will talk some about that, too.


If we are talking about DOS compatible file systems, then our current regular size 3 1/2 products can do multiple disks with an optional attachment. The USB stick would hold a number of folders that you name, and when a folder is selected then it would represent the entire "disk".



If we are talking about non-DOS compatible file systems, then the following options are available:

Our latest model drive (number 7) uses the front button to switch between floppy disk images on the USB stick. It sorts the image files alphanumerically and the button press will increment to the next one. There is no display unfortunately so putting more than five or ten images may get confusing. This software is also being upgraded and will be moved to our more common models in a few weeks.


The second multiple disk option is similar to the DOS option listed above, needing the extra attachment, but the attachment would choose image files on the stick instead of directories. This attachment has to be custom ordered however and so is not immediately available in stock, it will take about two weeks after the order.




For the boot disk, an image of the boot disk should work so long as it uses one of the standard double density formats. On the IBM/Intel platform we can boot from a non-image boot disk but it is iffy whether to work with the Roland's CPU... but also many machines are not that strict about boot disks if they already have some sort of boot ROM; I don't know the case in your Roland. (The common IBM compatible desktop/laptop computer is an example of a machine being strict about boot disks and being unable to boot unless the disk is specially made).

If you are using all image-files, then the boot disk shouldn't be a problem; but if you are mixing image files with non-image files on one USB stick, be aware our current software does not allow this just yet; you will have to use a dedicated image stick, and a dedicated non-image stick if you are mixing.




As for the SCSI option, we've been asked a number of times for SCSI support and we are still in the information gathering stage; the more we know, and the more requests, the better the chances we can green light that project, so if you can help out then that can increase the odds of getting something done in the next year or so.

Is this a SCSI floppy drive attachment, or a hard drive? Is it custom made by Roland, or do you know if any other more generic SCSI device is compatible with your equipment? Is there any documents out there we can look at?



Thanks,

--Chris