1 Dec
2003
1 Dec
'03
4:45 a.m.
On 1 Dec 2003, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 16:32, Andreas Holz wrote:
No, there are no analog elements other than timing, and that can be simulated
digitally with sufficient resolution to fool the controller. MFM drives and
many earlier types should be pretty easy to emulate. Think of the emulator
(one track at a time) as just a big shift register clocked at ~16X the drive
data rate...
Hello all,
I would like to see a substitution of the now rapidly dying
MFM/SMD-disks. I would appreciate if I could swap out a defective
Maxtor-XT/ drive, and an IDE-drive into my Symbolics or PDP simply by
connecting the "black-box" to the existing cables.
Agreed. Or given the capacity of modern (ish) IDE/SCSI drives versus old
hardware, being able to host several virtual drives on one physical one
would be interesting, not waste drive space, and make it trivial to back
systems up.
Several machines' drive controllers could be interfaced across a network
to one host. The "black-boxes" would talk ST506 on one side and ethernet
on the other, say.
Interesting idea anyway... but given the nature of ST506 is it feasible?
Doesn't ST506 have analogue elements to the interface, and a tight
relationship to the host controller with which the drive was formatted?
cheers
Jules
Peter Wallace