PCI floppy controller

[Fred Cisin]

On Fri, 22 Apr 2022, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
> As another person with a desire to be able to read/write/create
> disks of different sizes and formats I have found this interesting.
> So the question, then....
> How hard would it be to make a floppy disk interface using an Arduino
> or even RasberryPi?  If you could do that the choices of interface
> to a PC opens up quite a bit.  It would never be like having a floppy
> hanging off the PC, but then none of the formats I am interested in
> are grounded in the PC anyway and utilities would need to be written
> to access them.
> comments?

There are a LOT of possibilities.

At one point, one of my associates was playing around with various "PC on 
a board" motherboards that were 5.25" floppy drive size. ("Quark" 80186 
equivalent of an Ampro Little Board)  He mounted it with spacers on a 
5.25" drive, in an external case.  It was a complete PC, that looked like 
an externala drive.
His primary purpose was to build dedicated PC industrial data acquisition 
units.  (Elcompco made several data acquisition systems that 
interfaced directly with banks of elevators) 
With trivial some software on it, it could connect to a "real" PC and do 
disk I/O.


I once saw an extremely similar commercial product being marketed for 
Macintosh that was an "external 5.25" floppy drive that can read PC 
diskettes".  It was an Ampro Little Board on a drive, with software for 
letting the Macintosh access files on its disks.  They avoided mentioning 
what was inside the box, and presented it as a Macintosh special external 
drive.   (similar to the Macintosh version of Video Toaster having an 
Amiga in the box)
They added software to it to handle some CP/M formats.  I was amused that 
among the formats that they supported were a format where I had misspeled 
the format name (due to customer handwriting), and they copied my 
mispelling, and they had a format that I had put into XenoCopy for a 
friend to handle his on-off prototype machine that never went to market. 
(a non-deliberate Mountweazel poach flag copyright trap)


You could build a small box with a drive and either a from scratch 
controller, or a 765 (or better yet, a WD 179x), that connects to PC.
In that box, you could put almost anything that could work with the FDC 
and communicate.


But, as a first step, and "proof of concept" for an external box, 
why not just start with a 5160 or 5170, running software and communicating 
with your host PC?  Then, later, you could replace the 5160/5170 with a 
more compact dedicated bespoke device.


(OK, I'm still thinking in terms of the days when people were upgrading 
PCs and throwing out the old ones, so that an XT cost NOTHING)

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com