Machine Independent Storage Idea...

C. Sullivan wrote: Oh, absolutely. I merely meant that building a suitable mounting bracket would be done on a per-case basis (were there ever companies officially selling 5.25" to 8" drive brackets? I've never come across such a thing) Certainly it seems that driving a 8" drive using an 5.25" disk controller isn't too difficult in a lot of cases. I don't know if the reverse is true though, i.e. how easy it is to make the interface found on a typical 5.25" drive work with a system that's expecting 8" disks.

Maybe; but it's not vital to operation as the intention would be for the primary storage to be something like a CF card or a USB stick. Although that is interesting; the primary store is a USB stick then it's presumably easy to code the firmware so that the device can be plugged in via a cable to a system running suitable host software as an alternative (providing the device holds sufficient local memory to buffer a track and USB data transfer to the host is fast enough to not upset whatever the floppy emulator's plugged in to). Of course I suspect that most of us on here (and in the context of vintage hardware in general) are more comfortable with something like RS232... Personally if I were building it I'd put an expansion bus connector on the board and forget about any kind of host interface for the the initial release; people can add daughtercards (and updated firmware) for their favourite comms interface at a later date... Complete agreement. Keep it simple for an initial release; just keep it in mind what direction it *might* take in future, I suppose. Key for an initial release would be getting it to act like a floppy drive *reliably* and working with some form of local storage (personally I like CF, but then I do tend to be a bit anti-USB :-) That's interesting; personally I hadn't thought about GCR at all really. The sort of thing I have stuck in my head right now has three small boards to it: 1) A 'core' board containing CPU, a bit of addressing logic, some local memory (whether a whole track buffer or not I don't know), LCD / switch logic, ROM, and a header for future expansion. 2) A 'local storage interface' board, such as one holding a Compact Flash connector and any control logic (I'd hope that most work could be done in software) 3) An 'emulation' board containing the floppy side of things - connector, buffers, and simple control logic (again I'd hope software could do the necessary line twiddling. The interface between the boards would just be an expansion bus; essentially just CPU lines and a bit of selection logic. The key is that such an approach allows someone to make the floppy-side 'emulation' board totally different in future (along with a firmware change) to support some completely different floppy electrical specification, or even make it look to a vintage machine like some totally different low-speed data device. Similarly, the 'local storage' side of things could be swapped for something else; but the core elements of the device would be that it does have some form of local storage (even if a remote host is connected via some other comms interface), some form of interface board to a vintage system, and that the 'core' board stays the same (with the exception of firmware changes). But, I'm not a hardware designer, so all of that is probably wrong. :-) I suspect it's easy enough (but I don't know for sure). It can't be *that* complex, but whether it needs a change in hardware, I don't know. But see above - worst-case it's just a different emulation board. I just said that in a private email to Chuck a few hours ago, too :) I'm all for it - personally what I wouldn't want to see happening is people wanting millions of features from day one, though (that's what kills a lot of theoretical discussions on here! :) But a simple device that looks like an SA400/SA800 type floppy drive and uses some form of 'portable' local storage, and has some reasonable expansion options / future-proofing - yeah, I think that's probably doable. It's not exactly Warren's dream of a 'portable to every system' type device, but it's a still a darn useful thing to have and I suspect would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people (particularly longer-term). Plus it should be reasonably trivial to provide 'floppy to simulator' copying in the future without a physical vintage machine, which means that for not much effort we get the ability to archive possibly-damaged disks from vintage systems onto modern media. (I think Chuck was seeing that as a feature of the simulator, whereas I was seeing it more as a simple box of tricks which sat between the simulator and a physical drive to handle the necessary signalling) cheers Jules (all 'theorised out' today! :)