Hi! There is good news on the N8VEM home brew computing project. At long
last it appears a true floppy drive CBIOS is going to be available soon.
One of the builders has been building a FDC CBIOS for the N8VEM SBC and Disk
IO board.
As of now there is a new floppy disk monitor (FDCMON) which does most
everything my original did but much better organized and easier to work on.
Just tonight I got a crude disk format feature working so now it can format
floppy disks. Also there is a draft CBIOS available on the wiki. It
currently supports 720K DSDD 3.5" floppy disks.
The plan is to build up the infrastructure with a single model and mode as
its core functionality. The 3.5" DSDD is the most straight forward and
easiest to make work since it can use the polling mode.
Certainly other formats and disks are possible with later revisions. Things
appear quite promising.
If anyone would like to join in this exciting phase of the project to see
the N8VEM SBC boot CP/M 2.2 from a real floppy drive please contact me off
list.
You can also join the N8VEM mailing list and/or wiki to see what's
happening. We are always looking for talented and motivated developers to
have fun building home brew computers!
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
PS, please join us on the N8VEM mailing list and wiki. There are several
other N8VEM home brew computing PCBs available. More are in development at
present.
<http://n8vem-sbc.pbworks.com/>
http://n8vem-sbc.pbworks.com/
<http://groups.google.com/group/n8vem>
http://groups.google.com/group/n8vem