3 Aug
2005
3 Aug
'05
11:32 p.m.
there are a few contraptions out there by which you
can connect a CF or SD card to a Commodore 64,
presumably an IDE drive too. Try ide64.org for
starters. There was another one on Epay recently,
which I think used an MMC/SD card.
The notion of adding such a device to an old puter
has intrigued me also. Old RLL/MFM drives are a waste
of time IMHO, and new IDE drives probably won't work,
provided you even had an IDE interface (they do exist
for XT class machines, but most of mine have
proprietary buses).
I know this is a broad question, but to what degree
can an FPGA take the place of early custom ic's? Say
for instance you wanted to replace the video ic like a
NEC uPD7220 and couldn't find a replacement, or the
custom video or sound ic in a Mindset or Atari ST.
--- Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
____________________________________________________
Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
The idea is to
make a small single-board computer
with a microcontroller,
a WD2793 or similar floppy disk controller,
enough
memory to buffer a
few tracks, and a high-speed serial port for
communication with the PC.
The board would have connectors for
5.25"/3"
drives and 8" drives, and
would properly interface to all drive types.
Remeber that the WD chips are not still being made
(are they?).
I've thought about something similar. A single-board
computer with a raw
bitstream reader/writer (similar to a catweasel
board, but not
proprietary). Save the data on a CF card or similar
(there's rather too
much to send over an RS232 link in a sane time, and
it would seem to be
easier to interface a CF card to a classic computer
than to add a USB
port to a classic computer (this is important to me
as I only have
classic computers).
-tony