more real world tests

So tonight, I put my new FPGA implementation of the amiga floppy project to good use.  I read some more of my collection of amiga floppies.

GREAT NEWS.

It’s working like a champ.  As a matter of fact, I selected disks which I could not previously read with my microcontroller solution.  I could read 90% of the previously unreadable ones.  Most of the unsolvable problems were related with HD disks (which, based on my earlier posts, some drives handle better than others)  Note this is just temporary until I try other drivers to read the disks — and try covering the HD hole.

I have better visibility on the PC as to the “problem” delta T’s.  So pulses that are slightly too far apart, just on the boundary of what I consider to be valid, if I adjust my boundary accordingly, and now consider them valid, everything is peachy-keen.  I want to add a real-time option in my java client to allow this to be adjusted on the fly.  See problems? Adjust the slider, and problems go away.  Pretty neat.

I didn’t have this visibility when the microcontroller was interpreting the delta T’s.  The microcontroller had no easy feedback method to tell me what was happening.  Having high-level debugging of the information on the PC makes this all possible.

Nice to see the software purring.  There is still plenty of improvements to make, usability to be improved, etc.  But its working very nicely.