10 Jun
2004
10 Jun
'04
10:06 a.m.
On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 21:55, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Jules Richardson wrote:
Good point. I don't know how much work is done in the interface for
those though - quite possibly a microcontroller + some buffer memory. I
also remember taking one of their parallel CDROM units apart a few years
ago and they'd put black gloop on everything so that reverse engineering
was impossible - shame, as I never did get it working with Linux on an
old laptop and might have done so if I knew what it was doing...
I'm not sure what sort of data rate can be shifted through a parallel
port on a reasonably modern PC, so I don't know if it's even possible to
do the whole lot in software. Would be nice though.
cheers
Jules
Not sure if such as a PC parallel port is fast
enough to cope with the
data rate of a floppy drive and leave enough time for the CPU to do the
processing though... but that'd be nice; little more than a cable and a
bit of glue logic hooked up to a parallel port that could be quickly
swapped between machines.
MicroSolutions (DeKalb IL) in their "BackPack" line, made parallel port
floppy drives. I have a 2.8M 3.5" from them, but they also made a lot of
other models.