KryoFlux - Public Beta Released

2010-02-15

KryoFlux is here... Finally!

We are very glad to announce that as of today, the KryoFlux Public Beta is available for download. If you have followed our WIPs, you already know that this is the result of about nine months of hard work.

Summary: Read your old disks using the KryoFlux USB adapter. Formats supported are: Acorn Electron, Apple, Amstrad CPC, Archimedes, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, BBC, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, MSX, IBM PC, PC-8801, Sam Coupe, Spectrum and many more.

See the brand new KryoFlux Teaser-Trailer.

A graphical user interface is currently in development, and will be made available as soon as we have something usable.

Next steps... hardware!

Before we do the big step and invest further money by actually etching boards, we would like to make the board design available to public. Lars Reichel already did a marvelous job by making the first revision for us. We have inspected the routing and have not found any issues so far. We now have the option to have professional assembled boards made by several companies. Unfortunately, their DRUs (EAGLE design rules, e.g. drill holes) all differ slightly, so we have to find a common denominator. Then, we’ll go for the first batch of protoboards. Please note that this will mean fully assembled, ready to use boards for those who can or do not want to make their own.

We are currently running out of manpower. There are so many things to do so if you can actually edit EAGLE files, please feel invited to help. Next step will be adding bus drivers to clean the signal of really old drives, so again please come aboard if you want to help.

We’ve decided to make the board freeware with no restrictions. The only restriction is that we need to approve anything that uses our trademarks. We want to make sure that anyone buying something called “KryoFlux” gets something that has been made based on a working layout.

The source for the host software will be available as well, but release will be delayed until after public beta-testing is over. We are excluding use of this to anything that is not private and non-commercial to prevent commercial exploitation by anyone else. We will then encourage people to make it better and port it to other platforms as well. If there is any money in this, we want to make sure it gets used to further fund the project and to preserve many more games for many platforms to come.

We would like to stress that no similar project is free for private, non-commercial use. At least we don’t know of any... But now... have fun. Please report any bugs you find here.

Many thanks - and please spread the word!
The Softpres Team