17 Oct
2007
17 Oct
'07
5:48 p.m.
At 03:33 PM 10/17/2007, you wrote:
On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Andrew Lynch wrote:
There are 44 pin QFP packages available to control 4 drives, 8" to
3.5". $7.50 a piece. To me its not even worth the time to do a
google search for disk drive cores. Free usually means buggy and
YMMV any way... ; )
I'm making a 3.5" disk drive card for the Altair.
There has been lots of talk about these universal
floppy controller devices
and I for one would LOVE to see one done but so far nobody has made one
work. The closest thing I have seen is either the external
floppy drive and
compaticard combination or the parallel port
Backpack external floppy drive
from Microsolutions. If anyone actually makes the universal floppy reader,
please put me down to buy one as well.
FWIW, I'm exploring the idea of a universal floppy controller with some
currently undisclosed people in the classic computers arena. I envision
the final product as a fully-populated naked board. It would carry an
FPGA, support up to four drives of any kind, and talk USB to the host
computer. From a software perspective, it look like ordinary PC floppy
drives, much like an external 3.5" drive. It also presents raw
character interfaces to each of the drives as well. User-mode programs
can read and write raw data to do things like copying entire disks. Disks
can be mounted by way of usermode filesystems. My current task is
locating free FPGA cores to implement the usual floppy controller chips.
This will allow the external 5.25" drive that some people here have been
clamoring for.