Disc reader project -- quick status update

Anent all of this discussion, I'm sure that everyone's seen the HxC floppy emulator products: http://torlus.com/floppy/index.php?en What's interesting is that the USB model uses an Altera MAX7000S CPLD and 32K local SRAM and a FTDI USB-to-parallel chip. The claim is for 63K-1Mbps data rates. Given the buffer size, I'd say that there is darned little oversampling going on and that the datarate set on the emulator had better match the one on your system. A 16MHz clock is used on the MAX7000S. The standalone model uses a single PIC 18F series uC and an SD card (no external SRAM)--and runs with a 10MHz clock. The decoding is on- the-fly--there's only about 3900 bytes of RAM oin a PIC18F4525, so I'm guessing that it works sector-by-sector, so formats are probably fairly rigid. It's noteworthy that both emulators use fairly old technology. There are also $50-$300 Chinese-origin emulators available on eBay and other vendors which use a USB flash drive as storage. Thus far, I have not been able to get any meaningful technical information from the sellers. --Chuck