Sorry about the delay.... As I half suspected and others rather cynically thought, the devices from China appear to be optimised for DOS based formats only. This annoys me as this is not how the drives were described to me! In fact this little "experiment" cost me a small fortune
I obtained samples of the 3.5HD and DD drives as well as a 5.25DD. I tried the drives in several pieces of equipment including the Prophet 2002 sampler, the EMAX II and EIII and Alesis Datadisk. Sadly the drives didn't work in any of them!
What actually proved my suspicions in the end was connecting the drive to an old Archimedes computer. When attempting to format a disk in native ADFS mode it just didn't work but when I formatted a disk in DOS mode it did... slowly!
Taking the drives apart I suspect the emulation is just too slow and inflexible.
Before you all slit your wrists.... Having read up on exactly how the Shugart interface works I am still absolutely convinced that a solid state flopy drive could be designed for the EII. As I've said before the key is totally ignore the EIIs format and simply oversample the data in each track just as a logic analyser would. With the use of a small FPGA, an STM32 and some SRAM this would be possible and relatively inexpensive.
There have been many interested in this concept for both the Emulators and the Fairlight.
There wouldn't be too much issue me designing the hardware right up to a production worthy device but I'm not up to writing the firmware and FPGA code.
Sadly the biggest issue is that since I do this kind of design work for a living I've got precious little time outside of work for concocting such a thing.
Maybe one day!
I'm sorry to get all of your hopes up with this device - as I said please don't give up on the idea entirely. Although it may seem a long way off you must remember that the level of technology required to achieve this task is pretty mundane by todays standards - hell if you can emulate an entire Amiga in an FPGA you CAN emulate a floppy drive in one too!
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