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

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...

Good news good news. First perfect .adf

Good 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...

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...

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...

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...

first day back

You know, I always hate the “first day back” working on a project.  Things always seem to get screwed up between the time I last worked on a project, and that day.  Even if nothing has changed. Or so I say...

updated code and comments

  Here’s a current version of the code.  I cleaned up my code tonight, added a bunch of comments, and tried to explain and document what I’m doing and the logic behind it. The current code is so much better...