Floppy emulator

[krize]

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

keep this project alive, its great  tnt23 !

[Fester]

tnt23 wrote:
In short, I haven't put the project aside, although I wasn't able to update it for a while.

Here's a nice new LCD I'm considering to include in future design: it is a cheap COG 133x65 LCD with I2C interface.

Merry upcoming Christmas (and a Happy New Year :-))

Merry Christmas to you too.

Would this project work in a 2000? I assume it would. Yes, keep it alive. I'm very interested in it.

Fester

[InTheSand]

tnt23 wrote:
Here's a nice new LCD I'm considering to include in future design: it is a cheap COG 133x65 LCD with I2C interface.

Looks good, and a reasonable resolution/size on that... How cheap is "cheap", and going off-topic a bit, how easy is it to interface one of those to an old 8-bit Z80 or 6502-based system?

Keep up the work on the floppy emulator though!

 - Ali

[amigaksi]

I used a Toshiba 4030CDT as a test platform for the floppy drive simulator which is available from my website:  

http://amiga.krishnasoft.com.

I started this project when my floppy disks getting read/write errors.  Now I can boot up the ADFs directly from my Toshiba laptop.  It's currently works in read-only mode and for all parallel ports capable of 1 megabyte/second throughput.  

I previously did this for Atari disk drives which were much simpler to deal with and did not require a fast throughput so the read and write modes both work.

For desktops, you can easily get a PCI parallel port that does 1 megabyte/second so I can use the same machine for simulating both Atari disk drives and Amiga disk drives.  

Now I have a whole bunch of amiga image disks on my Toshiba laptop and I can boot from any of them or make them come up as an external disk (DF1..DF3).

[tnt23]

InTheSand wrote:

Looks good, and a reasonable resolution/size on that... How cheap is "cheap", and going off-topic a bit, how easy is it to interface one of those to an old 8-bit Z80 or 6502-based system?

Well, I got it for $6, plus bought two LED backlight modules to try, green one (shown) and white, $4 each. Not very expensive I think.

Driving i2c is not difficult, you'll only need 2 wires - clock line and data line. Everything should be done in software, and you must not exceed 400kHz barrier when talking to the indicator. You may wish to check this link for schematics and i2c software drivers for Z80.

[tnt23]

Fester wrote:

Would this project work in a 2000? I assume it would. Yes, keep it alive. I'm very interested in it.

Fester

I guess it should as soon as 2000's drives are ordinary DD ones.

[tnt23]

Not only Dennis' Minimig is an outstanding project, it also gives the rest of us good kick of inspiration and creativity

So I've finally managed to route the new board, with most, if not all, possible enhancements and future expansion possibilities (i.e. buzzer and fifth button  :lol: ). The picture can be seen here. (It doesn't show silk unfortunately, which has some nice artwork :-))

The boards are expected to arrive by the end of the week, and then the code will have to be rewritten for the new design. The MCU is faster now (16MHz instead of 8Mhz) There also is a possibility of adding Write support as all the necessary signals from the floppy bus have now been routed, too.

[gizmomelb]

very nice work!  it's great to see more development happening on any of the replacement floppy drive emulators in progress.

IDE port?  that certainly could be interesting!  Does it allow the use an IDE drive on a normal A500 or does it serve some other purpose?  Any further info on your project would be great, I love reading about these tech projects

[tnt23]

IDE socket is there to help interfacing to CompactFlash in the future

[countzero]

Compact flash ? wow ...

edit : removed silly comment.

[gizmomelb]

tnt23 wrote:
IDE socket is there to help interfacing to CompactFlash in the future

that was my first thought - stick a compact flash card in there for fast IDE access.

Is it possible to interface IDE to the floppy port, or does it connect elsewhere on the motherboard as well?

[InTheSand]

tnt23 wrote:
There also is a possibility of adding Write support...

Ooh! Yes please - this'd make it very useful indeed!

 - Ali

[tnt23]

gizmomelb wrote:

Is it possible to interface IDE to the floppy port, or does it connect elsewhere on the motherboard as well?

It doesn't - it can only be used by emulator's MCU for CompactFlash access.

[tnt23]

@gizmomelb

You've made a good point BTW. Since the IDE interface in the emulator is just a bunch of I/O pins and is (or rather will be) done in software, part of it can be reprogrammed if it is not used.

For example, its high 8 data lines used for 16-bit IDE access can control a real floppy for example. Like dumping ADF to a real floppy, how does that sound?

I just got my boards from the factory, here's what they look like. Let the tinkering begin! :hammer:

[SKAN]

Nice project indeed.... my 1200 drive has gone long ago, so i'm more than happy when i see such solutions....

[tnt23]

Just bought an IDE/CF converter board. Plugged it in, wrote some quick and dirty IDE code, fixed a couple of issues. Surprisingly, it works.

http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=1921=5