techtravels.org

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...

Latest articles

USB uart send and receive

Good news, good news. After banging my head on the same problem for the last three hours, I’ve finally made some more progress. Using option #2 from the previous post, I’ve written two non-isr based software...

finally got some work into the VSC

Ok, so I’ve finally got some work done on this tonight. I’ve decided to go to a 4-line buffer system because it’s a more round number than 3 — makes everything easier to deal with. I’ve...

Parallel port access in win 2k

Accessing the parallel port directly under Windows 2000, XP, etc in a standard user app is not natively available, but there are a couple different solutions available. The free one I use is called WinIo, and it is...

MFMSanityCheck

While I’m hesitant to post this at all, this is a quick and dirty application I threw together, and I do mean threw, that will check for valid MFM bytes. See the previous post for the link to the actual bytes. It...

Creating more test disks

From both Tim’s suggestions and from a reinforcement from Agans’ Debugging book, Chapter 6, “Divide and Conquer”, they suggest to “Inject Easy-to-Spot Patterns”. And of course, I knew...

funky idle routine

I’m making some progress. On a whim, I told my software to never go idle, to simply stream data constantly. I’ve never liked how I handle the idle state, and I currently lose whatever data thats in the shift...

Ground issues

Although I’ve been attempting to have a common ground for this whole project — I’m not sure that is going to happen. At least not at this stage of the game. I tried connecting the ground off the floppy...

Of timing, and general progress

I’ve determined that programming is like whack-a-mole(only took me 15 years to figure this out!) Fix one problem, and another one that already works stops working. This is what happened to me yesterday. My ISR...

PC to SX transfer images

I haven’t spent much time within the last few days on the project. Looking at the data on the PC, I think that there are still some problems. I think the problems lie in the fact that the interface to the parallel...