keithGood news indeed!
I’ve managed to create a fully functioning .ADF from a floppy. I matched the output from my hardware/software combination with a “transdisk” output, and it matches exactly.
I used ADFView to extract the files from both, and all files MD5 checksum identically.
ADFOpus still bonks at me saying “root block incorrect checksum”, but no program really seems to care about it. All operations work as they should, with no further errors.
The problem was in fact timing issues with the PC software (Marco’s modified afr.c) and my hardware/firmware. Just sending commands a little too rapidly. I watched the last transfer, and it didn’t hiccup at all.
I’m looking forward to optimizing this thing, but DAMN is transdisk fast. I’ll have a hard time competing.
excellent news and congratulations!
I’ve been following your blog for a long time and it’s been very interesting to see how you’ve progressed. There are other developers doing similar projects (hardware floppy drive) with FPGAs so it’s nice to see it being done with a microcontroller 🙂
Thank you.
I’ve been pretty excited the last few days, and I’m glad to see that I’ve finally made some concrete progression. This project has been a particular challenge for me, mainly because my hardware electronics background is pretty weak. While I’ve been playing with Radio Shack kits and heath kit stuff for a long time, I never really graduated past small things like 555 timers, etc. I’ve always been a technical person though, and I can have a one-track minded dedication (obsession?) that helps.
It’s funny because the REAL goal of this project is to educate myself on microcontrollers, and mix some electronics in there too. Producing a useful (to me at least) tool that can solve a real world challenge is only nice side benefit.
I don’t know much about FPGAs outside of what I read on Wikipedia 5 minutes ago. The SX microcontroller(along with Parallax, and the forums) have really been awesome. What a great little device. It’s given me the speed and the debugging tools necessary to get this project off the ground.
Thanks for tuning in. Without the support of people here (Tim practically has more posts than I do! 🙂 ) and elsewhere, it would have been impossible.
Wow, I have a 12 disk set of ASDG’s Art Department Pro on amiga 3.5″ disk that I’d love to put on my PC/UAE if I could build a setup like yours on a breadboard. Now that’s awesome. Keep everyone posted on further progress.
I certainly will.
Thanks.