Atari ST floppy drive?

[David Betz]

Thanks for the floppy cable pinout. I now have a spare floppy cable I  
can cannibalize if necessary.

However, I now have thought of another way around this problem. In  
addition to the 520ST that I have that needs a floppy drive, I also  
have a Mega4 ST that is missing its keyboard and mouse. I see that the  
keyboard connector is just a 6 pin RJ12 style connector that probably  
just carries serial data. What would be required to make a cable to  
connect a serial port on a PC to this connector in order to use  
something like Hyperterminal to act as the keyboard for the Mega ST?  
Is this simply a matter of making a cable and setting the baud rate  
right or would there be more to it than that? I'm assuming that  
something other than just ASCII is sent over the wire since somehow  
the mouse movements are carried on the same cable as the keyboard key  
press events.

Thanks!
David

On Jan 30, 2009, at 1:02 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

> On 30 Jan 2009 at 12:39, David Betz wrote:
>
>> Sure, that would help! I figured there was some other electronics in
>> the drive like the Atari 800 and C64 drives. If it's just building a
>> cable, I can probably handle that.
>
> Yup, that's all it is.  The connector's a 14-pin DIN, which is
> perhaps the hardest thing to find, but I may have one somewhere.
>
> The pinout is as follows:
>
> 1 - Read data
> 2 - Side select
> 3 - Gnd
> 4 - Index
> 5 - Drive 0 select
> 6 - Drive 1 select
> 7 - Gnd
> 8 - Motor on
> 9 - Step direction
> 10 - Step
> 11 - Write data
> 12 - Write gate
> 13 - Track 0
> 14 - Write protect
>
> You'll need a small power supply for the 3.5" drive, but a 5 volt
> "wall wart" should do--and you can tuck two drives in the same box if
> the mood strikes you.  If you use a PC-type 1.44MB drive, make sure
> that your disks don't have the high-density aperture uncovered (you
> don't want the drive thinking that they're 1.44s).
>
> Cheers,
> Chuck
>