Alternative Hardware Design for Floppy Interface

On 20 Oct 2007 at 15:08, Doc Shipley wrote: To use an old chestnut, "What do you want, egg in your beer?" :) That's one of the problems we seem to have to deal with in modern times. Not much mass-produced stuff is really hack-able to purpose-- and custom devices are expensive. I can get DSL modems with ARM7 MPUs, wireless, USB and 100BaseT as well as some sort of serial connection, flash and generous DRAM that are running Linux for next to nothing at the local recycler (or from Freecycle). There's just no easy way to dig into the thing to add my own doodads, otherwise I'd have a bucket of the things and toss a lot of my bigger boxes. But if the truth be told, I'm perfectly happy *reading* floppies with what I have here--once. What I'd like to do is *accurately* archive what I've got on, say, CD-R or DVD and get rid of the pile of slowly- decomposing library floppies once and for all. If I needed a floppy of any sort, then I could simply take some magic box with a CD drive and a 34- or 50-pin header on it and hook it to whatever system that normally takes a floppy and be in business, at least for reading. I really don't care much about *writing* floppies. I'm experimenting with a Catweasel, recording at least two complete revolutions of a floppy track in the hope that it will be enough to recreate anything I have in my archives, should anyone care. So while the form may change, the information is preserved. As far as using traditional imaging tools; it's no good. There's too much that a 765 can't read. Cheers, Chuck