"Imaging" a MFM drive?

[Chuck Guzis]

On 6 Oct 2009 at 17:54, Philip Pemberton wrote:

> If you wanted to write back to the drive, you'd need to handle 
> precompensation, which would involve increasing the clock rate (the
> ST412 and ST506 precompensation value is 12ns according to the OEM
> Manual). Unless, that is, you were trying to build a Write-Only
> Memory... :)

I'd recommend one of the common fixed-point DSPs.  Many of these have 
one or two serial channels that can run at very high rates and 
feature DMA into large memory spaces.

To keep costs low and development simple, I'd probably use a separate 
uC for handling the control signals.

Floppy emulation can go with a simple uC, but fixed disks run at 
least 10x faster, even though the amount of data per track is roughly 
the same as a 1.44MB floppy.

--Chuck