Vector 3/Teledisk

Well, I should have guessed that, since programmable parts are probably not what you'd choose for a job you're likely to have to maintain later. The in-situ-programmability does make it pretty easy to maintain, though, and the fact it's specified to drive 20 mA on each pin (though it clearly can't do that on ALL its pins, makes it capable of driving the cable + terminations. If only it were in an easier package to handle ... I like building hardware too, but the hour or two that it would take for the hardware, combined with the endless hours of fiddling with the software with which to process the captured data sample, would make this less pleasant than I'd prefer. I've got several old schematics for hard-sectored controllers based on old I/O LSI's, e.g. a PIA and a sync-serial port, along with several different schemes for responding to the index/sector pulses, all of which are different, so I know it would be a fishing expedition, automated on the PC. One of these schemes automatically inserted a sync character and 14 bytes of some sync field into the stream each time a sector pulse was encountered. With such irregularities, it has to be a mainly host-software task. The sampling hardware is pretty simple, and even the firmware would be quite straightforward since the MCU is so fast and the task so leisurely. The host-software, OTOH ... Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001 4:32 PM Subject: Re: Vector 3/Teledisk the