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inital results on error correction

While I have yet to actually implement the full-scale error correction as I want to, I did some manual tests today. I basically took a track that I was erroring out on, and swapped in 1-bit away values for the bad bytes.  In some cases, it appeared...

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Current status updated

Current status updated I was originally going to use a Microchip PIC, but they are just too darn slow. I gave up on the idea of using the PIC as a one-chip solution, and tried to use it as just a clock generator feeding...

amiga floppy project activity

I don’t know how interesting this is, but I thought I’d throw it up anyways. I exported the posts and comments tables from the mysql database, imported into Excel, and then created an activity graph of the...

great performance increases

Today I’ve worked on optimizing the performance of the AFP reader and have made great strides. My original track times were nearly 475ms. This was 300ms reading the actual disk, 125ms transferring, and process...

minor success at 2:00am

well I’ve got MFM flowing from the PC drive now.  A couple of things: Pins 10 and 14, the pins I’ve been using since last night, appear to be correct. Pin 10 is the motor lead.  Dropping a corresponding SX...

Finally had some luck with FPGA board

So I bought an FPGA eval board and a book on Verilog awhile back.  I made some progress learning things, and had some simple things like UARTs, writing to the LCD, and even some small VGA software(hrrrm, maybe I should...

found bug last night

With this new FPGA solution, certain tracks would result in what I call a “short read.”  A short read is any received track that contains less than 28,125 delta T’s, aka pulse times.  Given a certain...

updates with FRAM access

My initial attempts to write to the FRAM used SX/B commands like SHIFTIN and SHIFTOUT. These operated at a slow rate of about 83kbits/s. It did work and functioned as a good test of the hardware setup. Now that...

On speed optimization

The theoretical limit, assuming 300rpm drives, is 200ms per track. Or 400ms per cylinder, or 32 seconds per disk. Most attempts read slightly more than one track. I read 16,384 bytes, or 262ms worth. Right now, if I...

feasability of writing disks

While there are some other bug fixes and documentation to be done on what’s already been implemented, I started thinking about writing ADF’s to disk over the last few days. While the hardware part of it is...