30 Mar
2005
30 Mar
'05
10:14 p.m.
Hi
The external boxes that have tape drives would have to have
a FDC in them. These tape drives were designed to be paralleled
with the wires to a floppy. I'd suspect that the older ones
may have the right kind of controller but may have a clock speed
issue.
Dwight
From: "Jules Richardson"
<julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>
On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 12:42 -0500, Barry Watzman wrote:
This might be the answer to being able to access
5.25" drives on a "modern"
PC.
Semi-related, but I took one of their backpack CDROM interfaces apart a
few years ago - it was all totally custom ICs inside, plus I know
Microsolutions wouldn't publish any details on the control protocol. I
expect you'll find the same thing with the floppy drive version.
It would be really cool if 22Disk would work with
a drive connected to
this thing.
I *expect* it's a pretty standard FDC chip and a bit of buffer / control
parallel-port interface circuitry implemented on a custom chip - I doubt
they'd go to the trouble of buffering raw tracks etc. and using the
associated memory to do that. Which means you're probably limited to the
same MFM formats that a normal PC FDC is capable of, and nothing more.
Linux *might* support the backpack floppy drive; I can't remember...
cheers
Jules