On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 03:29:52PM -0800, Al Kossow wrote:
http://www.xcore.com/projects/isaflop
How sophisticated is the data separator?
Not. In the slightest. Instant resync on every passing glitch.
Works fine in practice! But I'd love to be educated on how to do
better -- a lot of the disks people would read with something like
this will be in much worse condition than what I'm testing with.
I assume it takes care of TK43 for 8"?
Yes. And the plan is to make a bunch of the select/etc. pins configurable
so it can handle radial head load, SA450/RX50 vs. PC differences, etc.
(My first two prototypes were just too stupid -- *five* FDD connectors!)
Please consider a PCI version. There are several people
I know looking
for that.
I'd sure consider it, but the PCI SIG doesn't kid around with their fees!
When I talked to them (many years ago when it was slightly cheaper) they
wouldn't even guarantee that they wouldn't reallocate your vendor ID if
you stopped renewing, although it's hard to see how they could do it w/o
causing just as many problems for the new owner.
Anyway the bigger problem with PCI (or PCIe) is that it wouldn't be able to
reach the ISA DMAC, so there'd be no way (that I know of) to be SW-compatible
with all the disk-reading utilities out there. So instead I'm working on a
USB version (yes it's been done to death but AFAIK never with a 50-pin
interface and you need special SW which may require a specific PC OS).
At least the USB-IF lets you buy a VID outright w/o joining.
The idea for that will be to make a raw floppy look like a FAT flash drive
with a .DSK file on it, so once you set the disk parameters you don't need
any utility at all to read/write the disks, just your OS's COPY command.
But then again, I'm into emulators so I'm obsessed with making one thing
look like another thing so it works with whatever you have already.
John Wilson
D Bit