MFM floppy and HD emulator DREM

[Josh Dersch]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 10:21 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr <ggs at shiresoft.com>
wrote:

>
> > On Oct 17, 2016, at 9:58 AM, js at cimmeri.com wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On 10/17/2016 11:18 AM, Peter Cetinski wrote:
> >>> On Oct 17, 2016, at 11:58 AM, emanuel stiebler<emu at e-bbes.com>  wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi all,
> >>> anybody has any experience with that:
> >>>
> >>> http://www.drem.info/
> >>>
> >>> ?
> >> Yes, I'm currently in the process of getting the DREM working with a
> Tandy 6000 and Xenix.  ...
> >
> > About $250?   Wish it were half that.  Seems like they could sell more
> than twice as many at half the price, and more than 4 times as many at
> 1/4th the price.
>
> Really?  Come on guys, this stuff costs $$’s to produce and they may
> actually want to make some profit.  If you’re doing small volume stuff
> (10’s-100’s vs 100,000’s - 1,000,000’s) it’s going to be a bit pricey.
> Frankly, to get the price to drop to half ($125), you’d probably have to
> get 10x-100x quantity increase.  I know because I face the same thing when
> trying to produce my boards.  Assembly will typically double the cost of
> the board + components.
>
> I’ll likely be getting at least 3 of them (1 for the IBM 3174 and 2 for my
> Symbolics 3640 and possible another 2 for my other Symbolics 3640).
>

Don't, at least not for the Symbolics gear.  The DREM only works with hard
drive controllers it knows about, and the Symbolics ain't one of them.  I
chatted with the developers about what it would take to support them and
they see it as being possible, but couldn't commit to it without having
hardware on hand to test with.  And given how hard it is to get a Symbolics
machine to even format a disk once you have a working machine, it's not
likely to happen anytime soon.

- Josh


>
> TTFN - Guy
>
>