3 Nov
2010
3 Nov
'10
4:37 p.m.
On Wed, 3 Nov 2010, Philip Pemberton wrote:
Ho yus. The current support list includes:
* Amstrad 3-inch (if I ever figure out why I can write 3us-spaced
pulses and get nothing but garbage back from the drive)
There are 3 inch drives that will hook up to a PC. Formatting PC-DOS
"360K" on a disk and trying to read THAT would at least give you a known
content on the disk. In addition, Amdek sold 3" drive sub-systems for
Coco and Apple ][.
* PC 3.5-inch DSDD, DSHD and DSED (yep, 2.88MB too,
once I get the
IBM drive hooked up and my half-dozen DSED discs arrive)
3.25" and some 2.9" ("SA400 compatible") should also work without
serious
problems, although watch out for power connector!
* SA1000, ST412, or ST506-interface Winchester hard
drives (with
adapter board). So that'll be basically all the 20-year-old heavy iron
that doesn't have a DEC sticker on it :)
25 years, maybe.
20 years would have to include "RLL" and ESDI (RLL has same cabling as
ST412, but different encoding and data-rates? , ESDI cabling looks the
same but has signal differences)
Initial software support should include anything that
uses a uPD765 or
WD177x/WD179x style controller. Though if people start sending me images
of strange disc formats (*cough* AmigaDOS), I might just have to add
format support for those too :)
You should already be able to handle most Amiga formats. Think MFM, but
without the IBM/WD style sector headers and structure.
Have you succeeded at FM yet?
MMFM?
GCR? (Mac (multiple data transfer rates), Apple 2 (13 and 16 sector),
Commodore, Victor/Sirius, Apple Lisa, etc.)
Tandy M100 Portable disk drive disks?
Whatever your final system can handle, somebody on this list can find
another, different format. And, sometimes arguments as to why it is
important enough to include :-)
--
Fred Cisin cisin at xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com