RFC: Floppy reader/writer project

[Ray Arachelian]

Philip Pemberton wrote:
> Hi guys,
>   The USB floppy reader project is back on track as of about an hour 
> ago. I've found a distributor who has a couple of Altera FPGAs in 
> stock, and although it'll take a few days for them to arrive from 
> Belgium, they were quite happy to sell me just five of them. For 
> anyone that wants to look up the datasheet, they're Altera Cyclone II 
> devices, p/n EP2C8T144C8N. Cost was £11.58 +VAT.

I wish I had one of these right now.  Someone who has UniPlus Unix for 
the Lisa dug up his disks for it and is attempting to make images of 
them.  They are copy-protected, but worse yet, they've been stored in a 
non-climate controlled garage, and some of them are unreadable.

If it would be possible to add a way to grab the analog waves (digitized 
to 8 bits?), in addition to the pulse-gap mode, it would help a bit too 
in terms of data recovery for weaker disk areas.

This would have come in very handy for the UniPlus disks...   I'd 
certainly buy one of these if fully built right now for $75.