Hello, folks! Hope you all had a very merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, or whatever you celebrated! Also, best wishes for the New Year, which will be... in around two and a quarter hours in my neck of the woods :) It's been a while since I posted anything related to DiscFerret. Rest assured, I have not been resting on my laurels (Balrog and Lord Nightmare have made certain of that!). In fact, I've just released a shiny new toy for all you DiscFerret owners... Well, two actually!

Hello, folks! Hope you all had a very merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, or whatever you celebrated! Also, best wishes for the New Year, which will be... in around two and a quarter hours in my neck of the woods :) It's been a while since I posted anything related to DiscFerret. Rest assured, I have not been resting on my laurels (Balrog and Lord Nightmare have made certain of that!). In fact, I've just released a shiny new toy for all you DiscFerret owners... Well, two actually! Microcode Release 0026 and C-API 1.3! New in these releases...: - Microcode: - Added a clock divider to the Data Acquisition core. Now you can specify how much timing resolution you need -- 80ns (12.5MHz), 40ns (25MHz), 20ns (50MHz) or the full 10ns (100MHz). When set to 40ns, the DiscFerret matches the Kryoflux for read speed (84 tracks double-sided in one minute and 45 seconds). At full resolution, it still only takes three minutes and 25 seconds to image the same disc. - Completely rewrote the data sync-word detector. All the ripple clocks and clock-domain crossings are gone, and the data separator is FAR more reliable. The capture and lock range is about 20% of the nominal data rate (!), which is more than adequate for most disc drives. The sync word may be up to 16 bits long, and can also include "don't care" bits! - Miscellaneous fixes to the data separator configuration (it was set for a 16MHz clock, but provided with a 20MHz clock. Despite this, it still worked fine!) - C/C++ API - Support added for the new clock divider register. Files are all downloadable from the usual place -- http://www.discferret.com/ (or more specifically:) http://www.discferret.com/wiki/DiscFerret:Downloads And you can, as always, browse the source code here -- http://hg.discferret.com/ On the cards for the New Year -- - Work has started on a new, simplified API. This will make its grand d?but some time in the new year. - I'm working on improving the accuracy of the INDEX pulse storage logic. When finished, this will improve the accuracy of INDEX timing measurements to match the data timing measurements! (This is a minimum of a factor of 8 improvement over the KryoFlux analyser, and a factor of 128 improvement over the current microcode release!) Special thanks for this release are due to: Rich Thomson, Karsten Scheibler, Sarayan, Balrog, Lord_Nightmare, ... and anyone else I've forgotten! Thanks!