21 Nov
2009
21 Nov
'09
1:44 p.m.
On Saturday (11/21/2009 at 12:22AM +0000), Philip Pemberton wrote:
It does look like someone's had a go at something similar to what I was
thinking of: http://www.lesbird.com/sebhc/storage/storage.html
Look under the heading "Hard Sector Floppy Emulator".
hey... ya! that's me...
HSFE emulates 10-hole hard-sector media using a 3.5" floppy drive for
Heath H8 and H89 systems. Should work for Northstar and any others that
used 10-hole media too.
I'm soon to do another firmware that will do 16-hole emulation as I have
an S-100 system wtih an early Micropolis controller in it (for 1015-II
drives) that used 16-hole hard-sectored media.
It works. Works really well actually. You have to use a 3.5" drive
though because the speed is far more constant/stable than you'd find
with a 5.25" drive.
I do it all by looking at the index pulse. This circuit does not get
into the data path so has no read/write capability itself.
Chris
--
Chris Elmquist