Re: ZoomFloppy - formatting a disk in a 2031 disk drive

From: Mia Magnusson <mia_at_plea.se>
Date: Sat, 12 May 2018 18:33:27 +0200
Message-ID: <20180512183327.00001db7@plea.se>
Den Fri, 11 May 2018 11:49:41 -0500 skrev Jim Brain <brain@jbrain.com>:
> On 5/11/2018 7:25 AM, Mia Magnusson wrote:
> >
> >
> > Btw in my fantasy world of feature creep, the ideal device would be
> > a combined "VIC-Switch 2.0", thee IEEE equalient "MBS-100" and
> > interfaces both way between IEEE 488 and the serial bus. Preferable
> > combined with letting the serial-IEEE interface hardware/software
> > keep track of prefered configuration for each computer, i.e. talk
> > with the attached devices and change their device ID and/or auto
> > translate device number. :)
> If you do not mind, I am going to steal this idea.

Go ahead :)
 
> I have, on the bench, a completely breadboarded VIC-Switch (I reverse 
> engineered the HANDIC one long ago and then recreated it with a small 
> AVR to run the timings and the logic to select a computer to drive 
> mapping.  It stalled because cost reasons dictated I I use a CPLD to 
> handle things related to burst mode, which I wanted to support. I
> think your idea would be a nice addition to the current project.

I'd like to add support for C128/1570/1571/1581 burst mode aswell. It
would also be nice if the IEEE-serial bridges supports some fast loader
and/or burst mode on the serial side.

It's easy to feature creep such a device though.

The MBS 100 aproach does btw use a separate client unit for each
computer, with DB-25 connectors in some kind of bus / daisy chain
configuration. Haven't reverse engineered mine nor even tried if it
works yet (except that the power LED lights up). They contain a large
amount of 4066's, three or four 4066 analogue switches in parallell for
each signal IIRC. Maybe it would be better to use discreet FET
transistors that can handle the current and has low enough resistance
when switched on? The Handic/Datatronic approach to it seems to be to
piggy back the 4066's. Although it works it looks like a kludge done
after they discovered that it did work nice on the lab bench with 2-3
computers and one drive, but didn't work with 16 computers in a
classroom with at least one drive and one printer, maybe even more
accessories. 

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Received on 2018-05-12 19:00:03

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