23 Apr
2010
23 Apr
'10
2:39 p.m.
On 22 Apr 2010 at 21:50, Tony Duell wrote:
The disk drive was standard -- a standard 3" unit
(and the Amstrad PCW
-- and Amstrad Z80 machines in general -- were not the only machines
to use that size disk). The disk cotnroler was, IIRC, a standard 765=,
the disk format was a normal-ish MFM one. I suyspect it would be very
easy to link an Amstrad 3" drive (or any other 3" drive -- some of the
Hitachi ones had a 34 pin edge connector with the stnadard pinout) to
another machine and write Amstrad disks on it.
My own Joyce has the 3" drive replaced by two Teac 235F (720K)
drives. If you change a couple of bytes in the boot sector of an PCW
8256 boot disk, it'll boot just fine on an 8512 as a 720K drive.
One gotcha to look out for is the power connector on the Joyce 3"
drives--it *looks* like a standard 3.5" floppy connector, but the +5
and +12 lines are exchanged. Magic smoke time if you miss that one.
With 2 720K drives and the full complement of DRAM (512K?), the 8512
is actually a pretty decent system for general CP/M work.
--Chuck