Alternative Hardware Design for Floppy Interface

I've been working on a project for a client lately, which has as it's base processor core: - 400mhz Blackfin processor + Includes ethernet, Async serial, SPORT (synchronous serial), Multiple DMA channels, SDRAM controller & lots of other goodies. - 16M SDRAM - 8M SPI (serial) flash (boots from this) All this built into less than 2 square inches of board space. It can even run Linux if you want. It's blazingly quick - I'm pretty sure you could implement most any floppy interface "in software" - no need for a dedicated and possibly limiting floppy controller chip. 16M gives plenty of room for code, track buffers etc. Since it's flash based, you can easily load/update code at any time. If you wanted you could bootstrap code over the ethernet interface and just load new code for vastly different encoding etc. Something like this would make an ideal universal floppy interface. It would cost a bit to get the boards laid out etc., but after that the per-unit cost would be very low - there's not all that much hardware needed. Just a thought. Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html