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Frog floppy emulator


skippy

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Have a look through the results the search function turns up, nothing specific to Frogs but there's some comments there that you may find useful.

 

http://www.blue-room.org.uk/index.php?app=core&module=search&search_in=forums

Use that link, the quick search box seems to restrict results to a very recent date, which will be of no help to you

David

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Thanks for the offer, but I'm in Canada so the shipping would be more than the cost of one of the cheap ones on Ebay!

I'm going to order one and try it....can't hurt to give it a go!

Not tried it yet, but I've got one if you want to give it a try?!

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.

Doing this upgrade is not something that we can support, however it is worth noting that several of our customers have tried this with success. In no way am I guaranteeing it working though! :-)

.

 

Perhaps it's time there was an official Zero 88 upgrade for the floppy drives in the Frog series. There must be hundreds of these desks in schools all over the UK and very few of them are likely to be able to allow an unsupported upgrade to be done. If there was an official Zero 88 upgrade it would certainly be welcomed by many schools and community theatres.

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totally agree, there is a fat frog in the school that I used to go to and have been back to help with there recent production, every show there is a ho ha over where the few remaining floppy's in the school are. but a couple of years ago suggested this upgrade and was told that if the manufacturer would install it we could have it, obviously they wont, an official upgrade is well overdue and floppy's have been obsolete for a fair few years now
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I totally agree. Floppy drives are completely obsolete. I have several FatFrog consoles in my inventory, and love them, but this is becoming a big problem.

 

If a simple little emulator like this will work, why not make them available out of courtesy to those of us that have dedicated our companies/schools etc to the product.

 

My newest Frog was manufactured in 2005, and for it to be obsolete in 5 years is rather upsetting...to the point where I would consider other manufacturers the next time I buy.

 

I notice that Christie lites here in Canada are selling off all of their FatFrogs....

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Well I asked Avolites about upgrading a Pearl 2000 with an emulator. Apparently it wasn't a straight conversion and the PCB that controls the information from the disk drive would have to be totally removed and upgraded with a new PCB. I'm not sure if software upgrades were also needed but if they did it for me, the total would have been in the region of around £900 to £1200 to do!

I'm not sure about Fatfrogs but these were my circumstances....

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  • 1 year later...

I have just installed a floppy emulator into my fat frog. It is relatively painless to do, bought one of these: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3-5-1-44MB-USB-SSD-FLOPPY-DRIVE-EMULATOR-E100-black-color-Version-/290811571725 and only took a few days to arrive from Hong Kong.

I had one or two teething problems but were PC based, my USB stick is now formatted into 100 floppy disks but, as the frog desks are a bit renowned for, the individual disks then needed to be formatted on the frog before use.

First time I tried to upload a fixture file using a USB it wouldn't read but after formatting on the frog it read it no problem. Saving the show files worked OK too.

 

Also swopped out the CR2032 battery whilst I was in there.

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I have just installed a floppy emulator into my fat frog. It is relatively painless to do, bought one of these: http://www.ebay.co.u...n-/290811571725 and only took a few days to arrive from Hong Kong.

I had one or two teething problems but were PC based, my USB stick is now formatted into 100 floppy disks but, as the frog desks are a bit renowned for, the individual disks then needed to be formatted on the frog before use.

First time I tried to upload a fixture file using a USB it wouldn't read but after formatting on the frog it read it no problem. Saving the show files worked OK too.

 

Also swopped out the CR2032 battery whilst I was in there.

Hi Paul - I would appreciate if you can expand a bit on your experiences of making this update. Our little theatre has just one Fat Frog and while changing to USB would be nice we obviously can't break it unless we are convinced that this change is only slightly more complex than changing the battery (which we did a week or so ago!). The Fat Frog itself has to see the USB drive as a floppy disk, as we can't do anything to the operating system, so I understand it sees 1.44 MB only. I am guessing that choosing which 1.44 partition is something you select on the drive itself rather than a selection from the FF? So far so good.

 

While we are at it, I would also like to hear from other Frog owners who have made this change to say how they got on and which piece of hardware they used. Also anyone who tried it and failed to get it to work reliably.

 

Thanks -- Peter

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Changing the drive is about as difficult as changing the battery - it is right next to the battery and above the work involved replacing the battery just means undoing 4 screws on the underside of the frog, unplugging the supply to the FDD, unplugging ribbon and plugging it into the FDD emulator.

 

Personally I tried the FDD emulator in an old PC first to convince myself it wouldn't blow my frog up!

 

Firstly I needed to format a USB stick into 100 off 1.44MB "blocks" using some software on a PC first, once that is done I put the stick into the frog and formatted block 0, then selected block 1 and formatted it, then block 2 (and so on - I did 5 in total).

Then put it back into the PC, using the software wrote the up to date fixture files to block 1, intend to use block 0 for saving files for now.

Will see how I get on over the next few weeks and will report back.

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