What non-DEC-compatible stuff out there can read RX02's?
Obviously the original RX02 drive can read RX02's... as can all the
DSD, Sigma, etc. Q-bus, Unibus, Omnibus compatible controllers.
But what can read RX02's using a generic SA801-type drive and a PC-clone?
Several years back I built a doohickey that plugged into a PC's
parallel port and allowed me to step floppy drives and read
bit-timing-information, a track at a time, into a RAM buffer, which
I then dumped into the parallel port and wrote some software
to analyze arbitrary disk formats. I wired the index/sector hole
detector to the MSB RAM line and used it with great success to
analyze and read several 8" and 5.25" hard-sector
floppy formats and eventually pumped a few thousand disks through
the scheme. Not bad for something thrown together on a solderless
breadboard using random TTL chips I had lying around the basement :-).
Obviously similar devices have been discussed here in the past
decade or two. Is there anything available off the shelf that
can plug into a USB port and let me do similar? Right now the
thought of traveling with a 8" HH floppy drive and a laptop
has a certain appeal as opposed to hauling around a BA23 and
a DSD440 :-).
Tim.