DiscFerret found a new home.

Fred Jan Kraan fjkraan at xs4all.nl
Sun Jan 13 14:14:05 CST 2019


Hi Everyone,

The DiscFerret found a new home.

I did get some questions on its usefulness, which I would address here.

Indeed the software developed for it is limited to a driver and some 
analytical tools. But it uses the same format for flux-intervals as the 
CatWeasel, at different (higher) clock rates. So any open source 
CatWeasel program is easy to adapt to the DiscFerret. Using the provided 
MagPie dump program I managed to adapted Tim Mann's cw2dmk program for 
the CatWeasel to dfi-files 
(https://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl/comp/divcomp/discferret/). Of course 
this only does FM, MFM and variants (DEC and Intel), but demonstrate its 
usefulness for archiving.

It is too bad production stopped and the writing image software never 
materialized.

BTW, reading floppy disk rate flux-changes can reliably be read with 
modern ~100 MHz micro-controller. Several are commercial available. 
AFAIK not open source.

Greetings,

Fred Jan



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