[sebhc] diskette drive

[Dave Dunfield]

At 20:05 04/06/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>Does anyone know how the Commodore 64 disk drives work? They were 
>connected by a 6 pin serial interface. There are a number of them on ebay.
>Do you think it would be possible to use them on an H8.
>Carroll

I've got a pile of them - it's basically a serial protocol with commands
to read/write blocks on the disk - I believe there is some information
available on the net somewhere.

IIRC, the main problem with the commodore drives is that they used a non-
standard baudrate - at least non-standard for must common serial systems.

You might want to consider the Atari 1050 drive, as it runs at 19200, and
I know the commands are documented - I'm planning to make an adapter so
that I can read Atari disk into the PC - There's schematics and code
posted to do that - main problem is the Atari connector is odd - I need
to find a spare cable that I can sacrifice.

If you want to build your own controller, the Nec 765 controller chip
used on old XT controllers is quite easy to work with - it would not
be tough to build an H8 controller for "normal" DD floppy drives with
one of those - In fact, I like the idea someone posted earlier today,
just adapt the XT card to fit the H8 - that gives me an idea - what
about an H8 "card" which is just an XT card adapter - Basically a blank
card with an XT bus socket at right anges, so that you could put an XT
card on the front of it - the whole thing would still fit in the H8,
and you could use any XT card you liked.

Regards,
Dave
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dave04a (at)    Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot)  Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com             Vintage computing equipment collector.
                http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html

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