Replacing floppy

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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Doable, yes. I doubt that you can improve speed without rebuilding the whole keyboard. To start with, the speed coming off the floppy is very limited. What is the floppy controller IC if any? The boot routines are based around floppy read physical performance and are basically just a track/sector/head block reader.

Why build when you can buy it off the shelf?

Pity they don't do a half height unit :(

Grant.

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anual.pdf

Handy when it works. OPs situation has the earmarks of when it won't. Just fer an example, try that for an Apple II and see where it gets you.

Straw man. You couldn't plug it in, anyway.

Apple II's used a non-standard interface. (A 16 pin DIP plug flatcable, as I remember). They stripped the standard electronics and used their own PC board. Instead of step and direction, they had the stepper motor drive lines, and didn't bother with the index pulse. And recorded with some Group Code instead of FM, which got them an extra 20k bytes per disk. Actually, as it was almost all in software, different codes were used by various game vendors for "copy protection".

And they charged $100 more per drive than the standard ones. Charging you more for less, and make it deliberatly incompatible is a long tradition at Apple.

Still, if you to took into account that some disk drivers would half step the track motor (more copy protection), you should theoretically be able to build a virtual disk, but it would probably be something like a (my guess) 20 MHz logic analyzer/arb waveform recorder, that could step between various track records.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)