Whilst the HDD Synth is with beta testers I've been working on a daughterboard for it that will add a full IDE hard drive emulated via an RP2350 chip using an SD card for storage

It's designed to also function stand alone, if you'd just like an IDE drive replacement without any of the sound recreation

However if you put them together it's able to tell the HDD Synth detailed information about how it's virtual read/write head is moving across the virtual drive. So it has the ability to replicate some really realistic mechanical HDD sounds in the future!

HDD Synth Pro hardware is currently under production with JLCPCB

It features an embedded RP2350B to handle all those IDE lines

I'm currently working with the breadboard prototype which has full PIO support, starting to implement DMA for faster reads and writes.

It should also be possible to emulate CD-ROM and more exotic things like an Iomega ZIP drive, which will be fun to recreate the sounds with on the HDD Synth

Also have an FDD Synth Pro basic prototype board in the same JLCPCB order

This is mostly because my breadboard was becoming a real rats nest of wires, so this will make it easier to prototype with. This model handles both the FDD emulation along with the sample based sound recreation of the various noises a mechanical FDD makes. As it's easier to emulate a FDD, this is all on a single PCB compared to the HDD Synth and Pro which are currently two seperate PCBs

Quite a few updates

HDD Synth: Beta testing
All the beta hardware has arrived with the testers and the feedback has already let to some firmware bugs to be fixed. I'm hopeful that we'll be a full thumbs up by the end of the year, so that the hardware can be made public in the new year. I'm still not sure whether to go the Kickstarter route or just pay for an initial run directly myself.

FDD Synth Duo (Previously the FDD Synth Pro)
I've been renaming some of the products, as I wasn't happy with the initial naming convention I used as it was inconsistent.

A demo of the FDD Synth Duo hardware running in a PC

Based on lessons learnt from this, the next PCB revision has been designed

IDE Synth Bay (Previously the HDD Synth Pro)

A demo of the IDE Synth Bay running a dual HDD and CD-ROM setup in a PC

The next PCB revision, which add 44 pin support and quite a few enhancements based on testing with the initial PCB prototype