Catweasel Experts out there???

Jim Battle writes: I haven't written code to do this, but the approach I would take is to align with the sector holes by hand: Spin reading from the input port that returns the hole sensor's status, then give the "start writing immediately" command when you see a hole, and write one sector's worth of data. Then spin waiting for another sector hole and write another sector's worth, etc. You might find that you miss a hole each time and need two revolutions to write the whole track. One reason I suggest this is that it seems like there is yet another reason why the Catweasel's built-in hole-to-hole write isn't suitable. Don't hard-sectored disks have an index hole for the whole track that is about halfway between two of the sector holes? If your disks have that, you'd be unable to write that sector with a hard hole-to-hole Catweasel write -- it would stop halfway through. Still assuming this is true, you could find the track index hole by spinning watching for sector holes and noting the time between each two. When you find two that are too close together, you've found the track index hole. I suppose you might have to do all this in DOS to ensure you don't get interrupts that you don't want and that mess up your timing. I'm not sure disabling interrupts is necessary, though. You also could use Linux, as you can do a Linux iopl system call that gives a user process high enough privileges to read/write I/O ports *and* even disable interrupts if needed. I don't know enough about how hard sectored FDCs work to know if there are problems with this approach... -- Tim Mann tim(a)tim-mann.org http://tim-mann.org/