2 Nov
2001
2 Nov
'01
6:46 a.m.
I'm pretty sure he isn't looking for those type drives. I think he wanted
to use an external ttl-signal level drive that had it's own on board
controller. That limits things to the Atari, Commodore line pretty much
as they are dirt common.
Other machines that used 'smart' floppy drives might be the Adam and
Aquarius. I never saw a drive for the Aquarius, but there was supposed to
be one. The COCO and Ti99 had parallel buss drive interfaces as did the
Apple (sorta).
If I were doing this, I'd probably try to get hold of a Trak, Percom,
Atr8000, or other drive which is able to run standard mechs as slaves.
Regards,
Jeff
In <m15zjhx-000IyNC@p850ug1>, on 11/02/01
at 07:10 PM, ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) said:
> I was at one time hoping to pick up a Commodore
Disk cheap for floppy
> drive for a computer I am building but never did because I did not have
> the docs about the interface. 5 1/4 Single Density Single Sided drives
I don't know which series of CBM drive you were
considering (the 2 main
interfaces being IEEE-488 and the serial interface used on the C64/C128),
but enough docs exist for you to use either type with other computers.
The serial protocol is pretty easy to bit-bang using a PIA/VIA type chip,
and the commands to send to the drive are documented.
I've managed to use an 8050 (IEEE-488 interface)
drive on a non-commodore
host, so it's clearly possible.
> did not help either.Is the C64 drives the only
external drives built
> other than the Color Computer drives by Radio Shack?
No, there are many machines that take external floppy
drives.
Off the top of my head :
TRS80 M1 (all drives external), M3/M4 (drives 2, 3
external), CoCo Apple
][
There's an external drive for the Apple Mac/Mac+ series.
Acorn BBC micro and Electron
FTS-88 (2 8" drives in a separate box to the main machine)
Intel MDS800 (ditto)
Xerox Daybreak (a 5.25" drive in a separate box that sits on top of the
CPU tower)
Most minis -- PDP8, PDP11, P800 series, etc (it's very rare to find a
disk drive that mounts in the CPU box on such machines, although it may
share a rack with the CPU)
IBM PC (!). (The original IBM disk controller card has a DC37 socket on
the back for 2 external disk drives)
Oric 1/Atmos (external 3" drives, the controller card is mounted inside
the case of drive 0)
Tatung Einstein (2 3" drives mounted internally, connector on the back
for 2 external 3" / 3.5" / 5,25" drives)
And doubtless many, many, more.
> Ben Franchuk.
> BTW It is too bad OS/9 was a closed source OS.
I'll second that :-) Nicest 8-bit OS I ever used.
-tony
--
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Jeffrey S. Worley
Asheville, NC USA
828-6984887
UberTechnoid(a)Home.com
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