Z80 home brew with FDC

[Eric Smith]

Allison wrote:
> Actually it's pretty decent.  However as you point out if you really 
> need the ultimate in relaibility and are throwing crap media with loose 
> drives in the system then a PLL may help somewhat.

I worked with many different 179x-based floppy controllers at a job from 
1980-1982, and my experience was that the only ones that worked 
consistently and reliably were the ones that used a PLL.  Many of the 
non-PLL ones weren't even completely reliable reading disks written by 
the same drive and controller.  That's why ALL of the later followons to 
the 179x and 765 that had internal data separators used PLLs (either 
analog or digital).

I'd be extremely reluctant to use a controller with a non-PLL data 
separator even if I NEVER needed to read floppy disks that were written 
on other people's disk drives.

> yep, now just fine one.

I haven't had any trouble locating the 9216 and 9229 as recently as last 
year.  Naturally you won't find them from distributors since they were 
discontinued more than ten years ago, but there are still plenty 
available from resellers and (spit!) brokers.

> Me I gave up on floppies as even at 1.44Mb they are slow and small.
 > IDE of CF offer more space and less interface headches.

So when you find a piece of old software on an floppy disk, how exactly 
are you going to shove that into your CF reader?

Eric