SDMD - Design 1

This particular design tries to keep to the original look by keeping the same form of the Microdrive and putting as much of the user interaction on the metal faceplate. The LCD screen proposed would be a 128x64 monochrome graphic LCD such as this one, which can be had for around 14 or 15 euro (and this is from Radionics, so no doubt it can be had cheaper elsewhere). Is uses a serial communications protocol so should be easy to interface to the controller and is a decent size, allowing for useful information.The SD card would go into a slot in the front where the microdrive slot would have been.At the right side is a scroll wheel for scrolling up and down the list of cartridge files on the card.Along the bottom are buttons illuminated from underneath, representing each virtual drive.So, the scroll wheel is used to select the cartridge file, an inactive button is pressed which assigns the file to the button and marks the button as loaded-inactive.It's possible that the buttons might be a bit small in a real model, so it may be necessary to change their layout to a 2 line by 4 button configuration.

Mock-up of UI

This is a rendering of what a possible user interface could look like. The info bar at the top would say how much of the flash card is used up along with other status info. The "-1" icon signifies that the unit is in pass-through mode and leaves drive #1 free for a real microdrive to be connected. Technically, there is no way for the drive to know what number it is, so this will have to be addressed, perhaps by putting the drive connector only on the right hand side so the unit has to be the last one in line.