26 Jun
2012
26 Jun
'12
9:49 a.m.
On 06/26/2012 12:41 PM, David Brownlee wrote:
I'm assuming the real time computational requirements would preclude
doing something clever with a relatively thin IO board and an
interface into a system running a general purpose OS. On the other
hand given the relative speeds of the interface and a modern CPU maybe
not...
(Envisioning something hanging off a Raspberry pi for a moment :)
I would think that a bit of analog hardware could generate the signals
to mimic flux transitions. At that point, the microcontroller's only
high-speed-requiring job would be generating the encoding, which isn't
tough for a fast one.
About the Raspberry Pi in particular...I'm having a very hard time
getting excited about it. It's a neat board, to be sure, but it's only
the twentieth or thirtieth design just like it (and nobody got this
excited about its predecessors), and you can't actually GET one without
spending months on end on a waiting list.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Does anyone know of any adaptors to fit a
"modern" drive (be it IDE,
SCSI, ATA, CompactFlash etc) into a machine with an ST-506/412
interface?
That... would be quite the task. The ST-506 and cousins directly
output the raw flux transitions as their data, so you'd need an
emulator which spit out the data as repeated cylinders, I believe.
Trying to interpret incoming data as low-level formatting would be
another matter entirely. You'd probably be better off emulating
the interface to the drives (e.g. emulate an MFM controller).
On the other hand, it's not *that* different from emulating a
floppy drive, which people have done successfully. It wouldn't
be impossible, but I imagine it would take some thought to get
it right.