Roland Quick Disk drives and FDS

[P]

Wait, it looks like you successfully replaced an FDS disk drive with a normal QD-drive and loaded SMB2 from a normal QD? How did you get SMB2 on it in the first place?

It's too bad FDS disks won't work, there should be a way to use normal QDs in an FDS disk drive by clipping on the extra plastic potion, but I suppose the opposite is impossible without cutting the disk.

[Skawo]

Just wrote to it with an FDSStick. I do have a real copy of SMB2J, and naturally it wouldn't load the Roland synthesizer software, so I had to get something on there.

You can indeed use the QD in a regular FDS drive, but it's a pain. Biggest problem is that it just doesn't eject properly. If you remove the front faceplate to get around that, the disk often doesn't align properly in the drive when inserted and you either get loud noises or just errors.

[P]

I see, I just missed the part when you succeeded in writing to a regular QD.

Anyway, it is nice to finally get confirmation that a regular QD-drive works, thanks for that.

[Goldenbubbles]

Remember,

Nintendo didn't create the FDS, its was mostly OEM parts from other mfr to make , just the disk was shorter so the added afew cm's to (NINTENDO)to extend it.

I've been using Roland QD disks for read/write for awhile with my MIDI sequencers, when I got a FDS I could then write the games back vs buy the games. I still have alot of QD disk with my instruments files, I could get a Gotek and move everything and format the QD disk to use on my FDS for fun.

Would be cool to cram in a 720k floppy and put the games in just one 3.5, will need a mad scientist to come up with that

[P]

Oh I didn't know there was a Quickdisk interface for Gotek.

[Skawo]

Wonder if the Goteks could be used as a FDSStick alternative. According to this issue here it should work as-is as long as you provide it with a .qd file. Thanks to a certain leak we now have a way to make such files from .fds files, although as far as I can tell, the only difference between the two is the addition of the FDS header.

[P]

Yeah it should be possible, but would require more work.


The main difference between the QD and FDS format is the lack of the CRC after each data block in the FDS format while the QD format keeps them intact, and a disk side is 65500 byte in the FDS format while in the QD format a disk side is exactly 64 kB.
Note that the CRCs can be recalculated so it's not like FDS is a lossy format as some people think.

The 16-byte header in the FDS format is kinda useless since it only tells you the size of the disk (which can be figured out by counting sides and multiply by 65500) and some emulators ignores it but it is also required by other emulators.