Alternative Hardware Design for Floppy Interface

[Chuck Guzis]

On 20 Oct 2007 at 15:08, Doc Shipley wrote:

>    Oh, I misunderstood.  I thought you were talkng about "an old [cheap] 
> PC with some ISA slots and some ISA prototype boards".  :)

To use an old chestnut, "What do you want, egg in your beer?" :)

That's one of the problems we seem to have to deal with in modern 
times.  Not much mass-produced stuff is really hack-able to purpose--
and custom devices are expensive.

I can get DSL modems with ARM7 MPUs, wireless, USB and 100BaseT as 
well as some sort of serial connection, flash and generous DRAM that 
are running Linux for next to nothing at the local recycler (or from 
Freecycle).  There's just no easy way to dig into the thing to add my 
own doodads, otherwise I'd have a bucket of the things and toss a lot 
of my bigger boxes.

But if the truth be told, I'm perfectly happy *reading* floppies with 
what I have here--once.  What I'd like to do is *accurately* archive 
what I've got on, say, CD-R or DVD and get rid of the pile of slowly-
decomposing library floppies once and for all.  If I needed a floppy 
of any sort, then I could simply take some magic box with a CD drive 
and a 34- or 50-pin header on it and hook it to whatever system that 
normally takes a floppy and be in business, at least for reading.

I really don't care much about *writing*  floppies.

I'm experimenting with a Catweasel, recording at least two complete 
revolutions of a floppy track in the hope that it will be enough to 
recreate anything I have in my archives, should anyone care.  So 
while the form may change, the information is preserved.

As far as using traditional imaging tools; it's no good.  There's too 
much that a 765 can't read.

Cheers,
Chuck