Hi guys,
As you might have gathered from my other thread, I'm toying with the
idea of building a replacement controller card for my two dead
double-sided Amstrad disc drives. Ideally I'd like to use as many
"standard" parts as possible to ease debugging and future repair. I'll
probably use a GAL to handle head-stepping and the write protect
lockout, and LSTTL for the bus interface.
I'm also planning on adding an overvoltage crowbar (or maybe some form
of a MOSFET OVP switch) on the 5V rail to protect against the common
killer of these drives: plugging them into a PC PSU (the power plug is a
Berg floppy power connector, but with a mirrored pinout).
I've got my hands on a couple of Texas Instruments MC3470A floppy disc
read amplifier ICs, and the Apple Disk II schematics suggest how this
can be tied to a drive mechanism. What I'd like to do is look at a few
other drives which use this chip to make sure I understand everything
correctly (a double-sided drive with a single 3470A would be handy). If
I'm being honest, the TI datasheet for the chip is utter crap...
So does anyone know of any other FDDs -- besides the Disk II -- which
used the MC3470A as the head amplifier, or maybe a few applicable
application notes?
Thanks,
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/