Disklavier

As Other Members of This Group Have Helped Me and been a great
source of disklavier info, I would like to share some info.

My Disklavier, an MX-88 with a DKC5R Control Unit uses the DS/DD
720k floppies. I still love my piano, but using the floppys is a
chore. Thought about upgrading to a DKC850, but way too expensive
for me, and on my piano you cannot use the extra functionality
anyway.

I used to be a electronics tech before I retired, and so I did a lot
of research, looking at drawings, schematics, etc to see if I could eliminate my floppy drive with an emulator.

I found a company that makes a floppy to sd card emulator that has the correct pin interface and functions to work with my control unit.

I decided to risk it,(The Unit cost $150). I installed it today and it
works perfectly. I have it set up for 25 floppies now, but am going to add more. You can use the piano to format to create a regular
floppy, that you can record or play just like a real floppy,
or using the DKV Utilities create your own compilation, and then save the floppy image file to the SD Memory Card via computer, and your set.

More testing to do, and still have to mount the emulator drive, but works great. You don't have to do any wiring, or ribbon cable changing, so you can go back to your original drive anytime you want. You do have to correctly add the right configuration files to the SD card,to make it compatible, but isn't that hard.

Once I'm all done, I will post a video to youtube. I don't know the legalitys of doing this, but if someone wants to know, I can specifically show the group how to do it, if there is any interest.

And by the way, your standard cheap floppy to usb emulator will not
work, and it does not have the correct shugart 34 pin interface.

Thanks for this groups past help.

Eric
slickfix@...