How to Use a Floppy Drive in Basilisk II

About BasiliskII, a 68k Mac emulator for Windows, MacOSX, and Linux that can run System 7.x through MacOS 8.1.

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Ulrich Bjohansson
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How to Use a Floppy Drive in Basilisk II

Post by Ulrich Bjohansson »

Background: During the mid-90's a company named Opcode Systems marketed a line of midi
sequencing software products called "Vision". The product was available in several levels of
complexity under derivative names. The company was bought out and the software was
discontinued.

Problem: Over the years, many musicians, who started out using Apple products, changed their
primary platform to the PC or Windows Operating System. Years later, these Musicians, who made their midi compositions using "Vision" and who saved their midi files as proprietary "Vision"
files, cannot today open their old files. Present day PC based midi sequencing software will
only open standard (std) midi files, not the proprietary "Vision" files. Having long since
recycled their old Apple computers, the only seemingly viable and reasonable means available is
to open their old files through the use of emulation software such as Basilisk II.

My Progress: Thus far I have run Basilisk II, version system, 7.5.3 and uploaded a copy of
"MusicShop 2". MusicShop 2 is a freeware version of the original 1990's vintage "Vision"
product. I ran MusicShop on Basilisk and found that it does in fact have an export function that saves midi files as standard midi files. To me, this seems to be a solution to the problem.
BTW: A very few of my old files were saved as standard midi files; these files can be opened,
using cross platform translation software, into current PC Digital Audio Workstations (DAW)
software such as a product called "Reaper".

Goal: What I am trying to accomplish is to get my old Apple Vision midi files (High Density
floppy disks) into the Basilisk emulation. Then open them in "Musicshop". Then export the files
as standard midi files. Then save them on another blank floppy disk. All in Mac format.

Problem: The use of floppy drives seems to be a difficult hurdle and is so far unsuccessful. I
can get a CD drive mounted but not the floppy drive. Tried to use HFVExplorer to get the midi
files into the system 7.5.3 mounted disk, but although the folder transfers successfully, the
contents, the files themselves remain at zero. I also tried to make a second .hfv file and add
it during the launch of the BasiliskIIGUI.exe - also no go. Please help as I need some
direction here to accomplish my goal. I am not yet completely familiar with the esoteric
nomenclature usually used with Mac software and systems, therefore, please use simple terms.

Thanks in advance.

Ulrich.
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24bit
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Re: How to Use a Floppy Drive in Basilisk II

Post by 24bit »

I´m not sure about recent PC builds of BII and PC floppy drives.
With BII build 142 Crtl-Shift-F11 forces the Mac HD HFS floppy in the PC floppy drive to mount.

Build 142: http://www.open.ou.nl/hsp/downloads/Bas ... 8_2008.zip
Guide: http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/basilisk_142_setup
(From Cat_7´s BII setup thread)
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adespoton
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Re: How to Use a Floppy Drive in Basilisk II

Post by adespoton »

What you want to do is make a disk image of your floppies, which should then be mountable. There are a number of tricky bits here, the main one being that you're approaching this from Windows. You're going to need to find some imaging software that will make an image of a 1440Kb floppy disk and preserve format. On OS X and Linux, the command line "dd" command does the trick nicely (with proper block size settings etc -- you'll need to google the right settings for your purposes); you can install this on Windows too via MingW or Cygwin, but there are a number of other imaging products that should also work.

Once you've made your image, it can be easily mounted in either BII or Mini vMac, you can make your changes, and then (if you really want to) write the disk image back to a floppy disk.

However, all I did back in the day was take all my Vision and DMCS files and export to raw multi-channel MIDI, and I keep that on my current computer. Unfortunately, the MIDI mappings in the program to my now long-gone KORG digital synth box are gone, so I have had to re-map to modern MIDI myself, using similar instrument sets.

I have no problems now importing those MIDI files into Sibelius, Garage Band, or various other systems I use in my more modern workflow (they even work on my handheld devices!)
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