[cctalk] Re: Paper tape in casettes...

Chuck, not to disagree much, because you are an expert, but there’s more to decoding floppies than just reading them. Some floppies have tracks that are recorded at different speeds. Some have tracks that use different modulation gcr on some and mfm on others. A lot of floppies have different skew. The applesauce tries to handle these problems and give you a readable file. It’s mostly in the software. I tried to send the discord link but don’t know if it got thru so here it is again https://discord.gg/njetE8zU Wayne Sent from my iPhone On Feb 27, 2024, at 15:02, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: On 2/27/24 14:42, Wayne S via cctalk wrote: Take a look at the Applesauce. It hooks up to a lot of different floppy drives and records and decodes the flux. Version2 of the hardware is being sourced and should be available in a few months. Good grief, there are more of these things floating around than one can shake a stick at. The Greasweazel is perhaps the cheapest, using a $3 ($1.30 or so from Aliexpress) STM32F103 "Blue Pill" board. It's almost trivial doing this if you don't need the "eye candy". Basically you run a timer in capture mode, with capture triggered by an edge on the drive's "read data" line. Modern MCUs don't even break a sweat doing this. It's nice seeing the proliferation after many years of harping on the subject... --Chuck