7 Dec
2006
7 Dec
'06
10:24 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 7 Dec 2006 at 10:11, Jay West wrote:
Chuck:
It sounds like what you are looking for would be a microcontroller, some
Flash memory (or possibly a CF/SD/MMC/whatever slot), with a couple of
common floppy drive connectors (card-edge [5 1/4], card-edge [8"], and
the modern pin-style [for 3 1/2"]). The device could be "dumb" in the
first stages and just use, say, 2 megabytes of Flash. A more advanced
version would have a small display and the aforementioned memory slot,
and give you a choice of disk images stored. The "uber" advanced
version might even understand some of the standard disk-image formats,
so you could take (as an example) a CP/M or Apple ][ disk image directly
I haven't been following this thread too
closely... but if it's going to
be a machine independent storage device, why is there talk about it being
a replacement for a floppy drive? Most of the machines in my collection
didn't have floppy drives available. There was also talk of holding the
flux transitions in a memory buffer. Is that possible on a machine with
only say... 8K of core when you consider the additional software that must
be present in the machine to interface?
I was the one who was talking about a floppy replacement, only
because the topic dovetailed nicely with something I'm currently
"back of envelope-ing".
Said floppy replacement would (within limits) not give a whit what
the host machine was or its level of intelligence. It would simply
be a plug-in replacement for a standard floppy and have all the
smarts needed for that purpose self-contained. from the Internet, drop it on a CF card, and plug it in
to the computer
in question and boot from it. Heck, while we're at it, add a
mp3
decoder chip, so we can put cassette images on it. *chuckle*
The microcontroller would interpret drive step instructions and return
data from the track being read. It could also probably be designed to
turn it around: connect up a standard floppy drive of your liking, stick
a disk in, and it would make a disk image.
I don't know enough about how floppy interfaces work, but I know enough
about microcontrollers to see this as being a "not too difficult"
project from the hardware side. Coding it might be difficult, getting
all the timings right.. but it certainly does not strike me as "impossible".