5 Mar
2005
5 Mar
'05
12:45 a.m.
Cameron Kaiser wrote:
I have a program that plays "Daisy" on the Commodore 1541 disk drive(!)
Miraculous.
It does it by knocking the drive heads around. I have a DriveComposer archive
that will let you compose arbitrary music for the 1541 (imagine a whole
chorus of them ... ) ... couldn't be good for alignment, though.
I used to have an alignment disk that worked by reading a
(specially-written) disk where each track was progressively more
out-of-line (or rather, started too far out, went into line, and then
became too far in). The software would determine which track gave the
least read errors, calculate the amount the head was out, then
repeatedly whack the head off the appropriate end stop...
Terrifying to hear it in action, but it worked, and well.
Gordon.
That machine
also had a very nice Calcomp plotter. I miss plotters.
I thik one of the old HP plotters would "sing" a song using the motors,
given the proper power up sequence.