6 May
2007
6 May
'07
1:58 p.m.
Philip Pemberton wrote:
Hmm, any chance of making the connector more of a CPU bus, with a handful of
address lines? Then you just plug in a little module, one per floppy drive, to
give that drive an ID on the bus.
My thinking is that supporting just two drive types isn't enough in a general
archive box, and even four might not cut it. The only overhead is a data cable
per floppy drive, and a few buffer / address decoding ICs...
The module would have a standard 34 pin connector for drive signals on it, or
I suppose there might be special-case variants for 8" or for some really
oddball setups.
(I was tempted to say you could make the modules plug straight into the back
of the drives, similar to SCSI SCA adapters, and then just have a single bus
cable connecting them all up, but the lack of any standard as to placement of
a floppy drive's data connector makes that problematic)
cheers
Jules
--
"What progress. It's almost as good as taping it... on tapes which self
destruct in seven days."
- Bill Bailey on the BBC's "watch again" service
That was the
other thing that I wanted to mention--that 8" drives
separate sector marks from index marks for you. Most do it with a
couple of one-shots--precision timing isn't terribly important, given
that HS 8" disks had at most 32 sectors. Given that, you may want to
make your determination of index and sector marks optional for those
wishing to make use of the drive capabilities.
That's a good point - if there's a spare pin on the 34-pin connector
(and a bit of spare space in the CPLD) I'll add the relevant logic to
it.