I've been contemplating a floppy diskette drive emulator with features to make it fit
better into systems using 50-pin Shugart style floppy drive interfaces vs. the other
emulators already on the market. Studying manuals for various 8" floppy diskette
drives, I see that they generally provided a great deal of configurability. There are the
myriad of jumper-selectable options which change drive behavior for compatibility with
various computers. Then there are features like FM data separators which are present on
some, but not all, drives. And then there are many documented "cut this trace, then
bodge wire this signal to pin X of the edge connector" options for special purposes
such as individual drive motor controls, simultaneous monitoring of all four drive ready
signals, etc.
Since fully supporting all of the options I've seen documented would have real
hardware cost and add complexity to the design, I'm wondering just how much of that
configurability is really necessary. Which non-default options are really needed for
system still in use and/or in the hands of collectors? Which were only ever provided for
some obscure industrial system manufacturer, with no surviving systems in existence? Which
were included just in case somebody might need them, but were never used in practice?
I'd appreciate it if anybody can provide insight into this, such as examples of
systems which required non-omnipresent and/or non-default configuration options.
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/