spiny wrote:easiest way is get an older PC/laptop that has a floppy drive, then write the disk image to a floppy. USB floppy drives won't work though, it needs to be a PC with a proper floppy drive.
He says this but he hasn't been getting nowhere fast these last few nights like I have! ;D
In an ideal world it certainly should work, but only if you're lucky it seems. I'm at the point where because I can't tell if it's because the floppies I'm using are duff, the ROMs I'm attempting to write are too complex or just that the wonderful Floppy Image software just isn't quite up to scratch (it is a little buggy in general anyway), that I'm seriously contemplating ditching floppies altogether and going for a more modern alternative now.
Installing everything to harddrive is also possible these days but then you've got to deal with GEM's limitations, TOS's different versions and separate quirks or opting for a different Atari ST OS altogether, which is fun but I'd be learning from scratch.
TheShadowsNose on YouTube uses a hardware emulator for the floppy drive but I'm not sure which. It beeps quite a lot but personally if would mean I could use images of disks and so still enjoy "compact disk" pirate menus, the simple joy of desktop.inf file arrangements and the effort of reading all these disks I'm backing up to PC wouldn't be for naught either! I'm certainly interested in a more 'modern' ST setup but I think I'd rather emulate that as I do with (boo hiss) the Amiga. A lot less mess if you ask me! I'll have to do some research once I've finally put all the boxes of floppies away for good. They take up so much space too...