[ Rob Goodale wrote in 141114 MMDigest:

> The floppy drive in the PDS-1000, PDS-32, PDS-128, and PDS-228 is
> somewhat proprietary.  That is, the system reads the encoded MIDI
> as a stream and not as a self-contained file.  This is known as
> MIDI "Type 0" format.

Hi Rob,  thanks for replying.  Yes, I am aware of the conversion to
Type 0 MIDI format.  I have an old Windows XP box laying around that
I can work with floppy without any problem.  I have no success yet,
though, but here is the information I gathered so far.

The floppy drive in the controller is a Sony MPF420-2 floppy drive
model.  I could not find any specification sheet on the drive, so
I am not sure if it is a 720K or a 1.44 Mb model.  However, I bought
a floppy emulator that can do either 720k or 1.44Mb.  Setting the
emulator to 720 Kb does not seem to work at all, so I set it to 1.44 Mb
mode.  I read somewhere on MMDigest that you have to set the "Ready"
flag/jumper to "on" for the drive, so I set the jumper for that with
the emulator.

Another jumper that I also set is the "Motor on" since the emulator
I bought has a couple different settings for different things.  Anyway,
with 1.44 Mb, "Ready", and "Motor on" settings I was able to get the
controller to acknowledge that there is a floppy drive and a blank
drive in it.  However, it then tries to format the diskette every
time I turn it on, but then fails to read the disk after formatting.
I have not had time to look further, but at $30 to $40 apiece I might
try getting some other emulator to see if any of them work before
giving up. :)

Thanks,

Vo Danh