23 Apr
2010
23 Apr
'10
2:06 p.m.
On Thu, 22 Apr 2010, Tony Duell wrote:
Indeed...
When the 3" drive was going out of fashion over here -- when it was clear
that the 3.5" drive owuld be the standard one -- some companies were
selling off 3" drives very cheaply. I rememebr buying a couple to use as
second drives on my CoCos. IIRC they were Hitachi units with 34 pin edge
connectors and plugged straight in [1].
I also have somwhere a 3" drive that was sold for use on the BBC micro.
Again it was a standard 34 pin interface and would trivially connect to
other machines
[1] Althought I added a little bit of circuitry -- a couple of TTL chips
IIRC -- to allow it to be accessed as either a double-sided drive or 2
separate single-sided drrives. Color TRS-DOS didn't understnad about
dobule-sided drives, so it was easier to treat it as 2 separate drives
under that OS. Of course OS9 had no problems with a double-sided drive.
-tony
The disk drive was standard -- a standard 3"
unit (and the Amstrad PCW --
and Amstrad Z80 machines in general -- were not the only machines to use
that size disk). The disk cotnroler was, IIRC, a standard 765=, the disk
format was a normal-ish MFM one. I suyspect it would be very easy to link
an Amstrad 3" drive (or any other 3" drive -- some of the Hitachi ones
had a 34 pin edge connector with the stnadard pinout) to another machine
and write Amstrad disks on it.
Some to think of it, didn't the CPC6128 pre-date the PCW? It had an
external drive connector which IIRC was a standard 34 pin one. Was there
ever an external 3" srive unit for that machine? If so it would be very
easy to link to another machine.
Amdek sold an external drive unit with two 3" drives. Their advertising
targeted the RS Color Computer. Trivial to connect to most machines with
a "standard" floppy interface.