DiscFerret update: PCB done!

On 6 Sep 2010 at 8:53, Steven Hirsch wrote: You have to understand Jens' motives for the CW. In a word, Amiga support. But for the very latest MK IV, all versions have had some sort of support for Amiga peripherals--and at least one model could be "flipped" (turned upside-down) and inserted into an Amiga. So it's understandable that his interest outside of Amiga support is minimal. The documentation (mostly the INSIDE.TXT document) is sparse and has a feeling of "if you lived here you would know what I'm talking about". But it's quite useful and I've seen far worse. Much of what Jens does could now be handled with most modern medium- scale microcontrollers. I think that's what most of the other products, such as the Deviceside do. All you need is a PWM-style timer with a "capture" mode and the ability to address about 128K of DRAM and a uC that runs at a sufficient speed to reduce aliasing effects. There's really no magic involved at all. You can get an AVR Mega (with external addressing capability) to produce acceptable results; an ARM-type uC would also be a good choice and most DSP chips would probably do the job. Given the rather pedestrian nature of the job and the fast cheap uCs available today, I doubt that a FPGA makes a lot of cost-effective sense in the case of floppy work. And of course, one has to write the software to interpret the results. --Chuck