13 Oct
2016
13 Oct
'16
5:45 a.m.
On 13/10/16 11:39, Santo Nucifora wrote:
Hi Eric,
First off, thanks for attempting this. I spent last night trying to
recreate a disk using the CP/M-86 streams I had posted with the Kryoflux
and failed. I'm going to play with it a little until I can get a working
reproduction so I would not rely on those Kryoflux streams just yet. I am
guessing the only way I can reproduce a disk is through the Kryoflux
streams written back to a disk but I can't seem to do that.
I noticed that Discferret had a wiki page on the Victor 9000 format. It
looks like it handled the format but it looks like it is a dead project and
I'm guessing you can't get Discferret boards anymore.
I have about a dozen bare DiscFerret boards in my cupboard if anyone
wants one.
The board house ran them as hot-air levelled instead of silver-plated,
so they need the SMD pads for the RAM and FPGA (and ideally the PIC too)
cleaning with desolder wick before having those parts installed.
Electrically they're fine.
If you'd prefer to run your own boards (maybe you really like the gold
on purple that OSH Park do?), I have no problem with someone downloading
Eagle, running CAM and uploading the resulting Gerber files to a board
house. Student Me would have appreciated it if you'd have kicked him a
few quid for doing that, but these days... screw it, go have fun. It's
GPLv2 / open hardware. If we ever meet in person, say thank-you. That'll
do. :)
Heck, go make a box full of DiscFerrets for you and your friends. I'd
actually like to see people getting something out of it more than I'd
like to see money from it :)
There's even an ATE program (FerretTest) which can give you a rough idea
where to look for bad solder joints and things. Lots of things to help
you DIY boards (though I actually wrote it because I had a run of boards
with solder bridges on the RAM and FPGA which were causing read/write
issues).
As far as "dead project" goes, it's only dead in the sense that I have
no inclination to buy parts and assemble boards again. Anyone who's been
following DiscFerret for long enough knows the tale. The record's been
stuck so long it's worn through, so I won't repeat it :P
Regarding the API and microcode, they're not "dead", they're
"stable"! I
can't think of anything else to add. What more does it need than read
and write? Tell me!
TL/DR: it was a university final year project that kinda escaped the
lab. I'm glad you all still like it and talk about it. I never saw that
coming.
Cheers,
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/