On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Tothwolf wrote:
Run all other
signals through to all drives, but run the drive select
lines through a switch to control which drive you want. Leave 14
disconnected (most drives and software expect the drive to be #0 or #1),
and get a 2P50T rotary switch?
That would work well if all the tape drives that
use the floppy interface
followed the rules, but not all do. I guess it would be possible to build
a board with some logic chips that could isolate individual drives from
the bus, but I think it would be much easier for now to only connect one
drive at a time.
Hmmm. I don't doubt that there were a lot of really weird ones, but
I wonder which rules they don't follow. My experience with floppy
controller run tape drives is limited to the 10 to 40 M stuff like the
Irwin and Archive, which were intended to coexist with floppy drives. I
was able to leave several connected to 286 machines on my DS switched
cables. (One of my 286's had 6 floppy drives and 2 tape drives on one
controller card)
(Some of my machines also had switches to disconnect the Index line for
easier reading of WD formats, and on one I had an inline switch module
with 34 slide switches - If you could find those, it would provide
maximum versatility)