Replacing floppy

On a sunny day (Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:55:41 +1000) it happened Grant wrote in :

No, not wrong end, just reverse data in data out. The 8272 can generate the IBM format, that assumes the 'device' will want a response, so it expects that format. It also can decode that format, so it can understand what to write to for exampel a SDcard. But anyways, somebody has done it 100% in a 40MHz PIC it seems. Using a FPGA would be cool to, and easier I think.

But doin gi t100% in a PIC is is not a project the inexperienced.

Well, that would explain why my virus scanner has been going off a day early lately..

Thanks for the tip, window licker!

'cos floppies are so unreliable, and I have a borrowed instrument that can dump screen images to floppy. Be nice to have a black box pretend to be floppy but translate the dumped images to SD memory or something.

Options I have are emulating a parallel printer on a printer port, or emulating the floppy drive. I don't have tech info on the internal data bus for TDS3034 :( Don't have a much of a budget either.

It's been done, but they use programmable logic for USB interface, or a very fast PIC chip for SD interface -- these are from a link posted upthread.

For which? Floppy interface or TDS3034?

Floppy interface is easy, translate serial data stream to/from memory at an address block based on track number, sector? Pop out index marks at suitable rate and respond to the step, dir, etc signals. How hard can it be?

The old Ferguson BigBoard could read floppy drive with Z80 micro running at 2.5MHz, without a controller. Nasty (tricky?) use of NMI to get the response time for data transfer though.

Thanks, Grant.

You were originally told by the Thompson tard or Terrell tard.

You were simply too much of a tard to have caught it.

Floppies are fine if you do not rely on the 6x factory format that had no error checking.

You MUST re-format, and fully format (not quick, if it is even available) the disk. THEN check it for errors aside from the format's standard check. THEN you can rely on it... a little longer.

The idiots should never have shit canned 2.88 as it was laser positioned, and had twice the capacity, AND rarely EVER had bad sectors of missed a track or even a single bit. They used better magnetic media as well. Now, I can't even find a modern MOBO BIOS that has it included.

But they are the best of the crop, and they should be revived for the end of life years of the floppy. Even if those 'years' end up being singular.

They Atari 800 had a Tandon 5.25" full height, 360kB floppy drive.

The interface was two connectors. If I still had the hundred or so games it had, I could get twenty times what I paid for them now.

And here all these years, I thought that this dope knew how to read back in a thread to catch up.

Floppy suffers data loss. Mem sticks do not emulate a floppy, or get assigned an "A:" drive letter (typically).

Folks need to get a mem stick card reader to appear to the system as a floppy and interface it through the floppy drive connector, not the typical mem stick USB bus. Therefore, we need to emulate a floppy at the hardware level. The mem stick plugs in the front, but the floppy cable plugs in the back.

Not worth doing. Press F8 (if that is how your MOBO is set up, and tell it to boot the mem stick.

Both my Asus old ass AMD X2 mobo of 5 years age does it, and my new Revo does it. It even installs Windows Vista or Windows 7 through the mem stick port, and will let me install my boot loader (XOSL) which requires a DOS boot and has too look like the A: drive. Works fine with everything from DOS 3 to 6.x to 98SE on, and it shows as the A: drive.

Yes, but each time I do that I throw out 2 or 3 bad disks, and eventually the floppy drive will go bad too.

Grant.

Is the TDS3034 PC based? Open it up. Maybe there is some slot (PCMCIA, mini-PCI or ISA) that will take a network card.

disk.

I wish, it's 68k based :( I've not opened the thing up, but going by info on the 'net the internal interfaces are proprietary :( Plus the fact that a Hong Kong company offers the 10Mbps NIC module second-hand for USD800 plus shipping & insurance. Old gear...

So replacing the floppy with some emulated device would by easy, at least that approach will work. Later and current models have a USB port instead of the floppy, but Tektronix have stated that there is not and will not be a USB replacement for the floppy on older instruments.

Emulate a printer interface seems easy, but then convert each print data stream back to graphics image? Haven't looked how hard that is to do. Would be a non-invasive solution -- as I have this instrument on long term loan I'd like not to fiddle too much with it.

Each time I want to 'snap' some images, I have to find some (s/h) floppies, format and test them, discard the 75% odd failures, and hope the survivor will last for a session...

Grant.

Well sorry,. Terrel is on my block list.. He's one that I have put out to pasture, because he won't do it himself.

Oops, it's MPC680DC Power PC based, "The processor system contains a MPC680DC Power PC microprocessor that controls the entire instrument. The processor system also contains flash ROM, system RAM, and interfaces to communications modules, the parallel printer port, and the floppy disk drive". -- TDS3000 service manual.

Service manual is to module level with no schematics :(

Grant.

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real=20

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tell

Revo

everything

Hello, we are not talking about a PC here, but an instrument full of custom HW and SW. It just writes FAT16 floppies.

about 3

overtime.

What

and

expensively,

Interesting, i don't remember that. Maybe that was from the IMSAI, MITS and Cromenco era. I do remember that the Apple II and early Macs did weird things.