25 May
2006
25 May
'06
9:56 p.m.
On Thu, 25 May 2006, Tony Duell wrote:
Alas, I don't have one, but I do have some 67.5 TPI 3.5" drives.
RE-WRITING to
Epson Geneva PX-8 is awkward (67.5 TPI)
Presumably you mean the disks used in a
PF-10 (the PX8 can use the TF20
drive, which is a pair of normal 40-cylinder 5.25" drives).
If you have a working PF10, you could talk to it from a PC serial port
(the interface is asynchronous, RS232 levels, 38400 baud). Talking of oddball floppies (and Epson), I haev,
somewhere, an Epson
thing about the size of the TF20, but labelled BM-5 (IIRC). It contains a
single 5.25" drive. Now for the odd part. The cables to that drive look
like ST412 _hard_ drive cables (i.e. a 34 pin and a 20 pin connector).
The controller board, which has a parallel interface connector back to
the host (pesumably it goes with some special I/O card for a QX10 that I
don't have) has a hard disk controller chipset on it. But the drive sure
looks like an overcomplicated floppy drive.
What do I have here, and what sort of disks does it use?
I don't know. But somewhere, I have a similar unit from NEC!