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Replacing floppy

I have an old keyboard that uses floppy to hold its os. It takes about 3 mins to fully load if that. Also the disk can become corrupt overtime.

I was thinking of replacing the floppy with a ssd type of system. What I'm thinking is possible is to "hijack" the floppy interface cable and simulate a floppy disk but provide a faster system. Essentially emulating the floppy disk protocol, which I imagine it uses some existing standard, but reading off a ssd/eeprom.

Am I on the right track? Here the biggest problem is probably getting the protocol correct and the electronics would be rather simple? Probably can be done with a pic and not much more...

Reply to
George Jefferson
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Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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Reply to
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.

Reply to
JosephKK

Why build when you can buy it off the shelf?

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Reply to
John B

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

Grant.

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Reply to
Grant

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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.

Reply to
JosephKK

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)

Reply to
Mark Zenier

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