7 May
2013
7 May
'13
10:12 a.m.
You don't need an FPGA to do floppy interfacing. Most speedy microcontrollers
can do it with just bit-banged I/O.
What would be nice from a feature stand-point is a floppy<->USB board that could
go both ways. eg.
Mode 1) Read a USB stick and emulate a drive to a host.
Mode 2) Interface a real drive to a USB host both as MSC and with full image
archive capture capability.
Would require a micro that goes both ways on USB like a PIC32 or STM32 as well
as switchable pull-ups on every floppy data line. But it could be done very
cheaply.
-Alan
On May 7, 2013 at 12:04 PM David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
On May 7, 2013, at 11:51 AM, Al Kossow <aek at
bitsavers.org> wrote:
Dig back on the list for the discussion last year
talking about John
Wilson's efforts at building a floppy controller in an
FPGA, my request for a PCI version, and how getting that to work on 'modern'
PC hardware is difficult.
I don't remember that discussion, which is odd, because it's right up my
alley (and another one of my pipe dreams that I have a hard time actually
getting around to). How fixed are you on PCI? USB is a little more
forward-compatible and also a lot easier to do drivers (or pseudo-drivers
in libusb) for. And that would be relatively cheap hardware to build,
which is what typically stops me from doing most of my projects.
It occurs to me, though, that a lot of modern microcontrollers are fast
enough to decode the data using the built-in capture and compare timer
functions, though I think there's a good chance that would be a lot more
work to make reliable than a digital PLL in an FPGA.
- Dave