I'm an old hand at the CFFA card, having several in my collection already. But this next board design takes the old CF/IDE idea another couple of steps further. Rather than (or, in addition to...) using these memory chips as fake storage devices in their own right, now you can hold piles and piles of fake storage devices as individual files on their native file systems. It's a little tough to put into words - so I drew up some pictures that might help.
The original CFFA card, and others like it, divides a memory device into one more more native partitions:
- cf1.png (46.56 KiB) Viewed 21888 times
Programs like CiderPress have been specially modified to understand these partitions and work with them so that things like backup, etc. can occur. But you no longer have to worry about native partitioning in the CFFA3000 - because files representing the entire hard drive (i.e. 32MB ProDOS-ordered files) can be stored on a memory device and used/mounted. Like this:
- cf2.png (46.34 KiB) Viewed 21888 times
And of course it's not just ProDOS any more... with the CF3000's ability to host a virtual Disk ][ adapter, you can "insert" two disk images at once - any OS, any format. I even tried DOS 3.3's BOOT13 program to boot a DOS 3.2-formatted .NIB image:
- cf3.png (61.43 KiB) Viewed 21886 times
So the coolest part of this is the new "virtualization" of disk images - an entire hard disk image, OS and all, is just a file on the CF or USB card... backing it up is as easy as plugging it into your modern computer and copying off the file, then re-inserting it into the CFFA3000. Done!
