Hi all,
This is going to seem like a weird question......
Does anyone know why on almost all of the Acorn machines with disk
interfaces (including at least one non-Acord designed one), they gate
the drive select signals with the motor on signal. e.g. drive select is
inactive unless the moror is also on ?
This seems to be a peculiarity of Acorn as none of the other machines I
am familliar with do this (Dragon, CoCo etc), even when they use the
WDxa7xx type controlers. Though I guess cirtainly with the Atom / BBC
A/B it may be a requirement of the 8271, it seems odd that it was
carried over to the machines that only ever had 177x controlers.
I know that some Imtel disk cotnrollker ICs poll all the drives when they
are idle lookinf for a change of state of the ready line, etc. The 8272
certianly does this, I've got a CP/M86 box behind me where the (8") drive
LEds light dimply when disk accesses are not taking place as the 8272
polls them. The PC, of course, didn't use the drive select outputs of the
8272. probably because of this 'feature'...
Whether the 8271 does the same, I don't know, but it might well do. If
so, it could explain the gating of deive select lines.
And I guess that once they had a design that worked, they didn't change it...
-tony