27 Jul
2004
27 Jul
'04
8:22 a.m.
On Tuesday 27 July 2004 14:34, Doc Shipley wrote:
I'm working on a PC-based external 8"
floppy drive, mostly to be
able to format the 30-40 pounds of perforated placemats (aka
bulk-erased RX02 disks) in my garage, and to be able to archive the
few PDP-8 and Xerox systems disks, games disks, diags and source
disks I have, but don't have the equipment to run. I've discussed
this in pieces here, but I'm ready to try to actually put it all
together.
Oh, one thing to remember... RX01's use single-density (FM) encoding,
and RX02's use a mixed-density (FM for sector headers + MFM for data)
encoding. You won't be able to read RX02's for sure (and probably also
RX01s due to their header format) on a PC's floppy disk controller.
Somethink like a CatWeasel or other similar controller probably could do
the trick, or you could build your own disk controller. :)
Pat
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