16 Apr
2007
16 Apr
'07
12:10 a.m.
Entity wrote:
Hello, all.
Does anyone on the list know if anyone in our extended community has ever
come up with some sort of plug-compatible flash memory replacement for MFM
drives?
Not to my knowledge, no. I'm surprised it's actually *that* big a task for
someone who knows about designing circuits to run at the sorts of speeds
needed, but as far as I'm aware the paths of need and ability haven't crossed
yet :-)
The theory is (in theory ;) pretty simple, and I would have thought that the
tricky part of the practice is just getting it to run at the necessary speeds
reliably.
I've a vague idea that I've seen a commercial
offering at some point in
the past, but obviously that'd be a fairly expensive move to make.
(Fairly? Oh, OK. Very.)
Yeah, I'd found something a year or so ago. I don't remember exact numbers
now, but it was well into the thousands (I don't recall if that were dollars
or pounds, but either way the numbers were still scary)
I've got a Northstar Horizon that I mentioned on
here many, many years
ago and I've just started looking at it again; once I've got it up and
running it'd be nice to add some sort of permanent storage, but without
jettisoning one of the floppy drives. The SuperIO board is one option,
but I'd like to keep it as stock-Northstar as I can.
I'm not at all familiar with that board - but surely if you're willing to put
a non-stock emulated hard drive in the machine, that's no different to putting
a non-original S100 board into the machine which achieves the same storage
aims? Either strike me as trivially reversible should someone ever want to do
so, and neither approach would be "stock".
cheers
Jules