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

mid-january status

So here’s where I’m at: I know my memory read and write routines are good.  I calculate a checksum as I’m writing the data, and on the output of that data to the PC, I also calculate the checksum. ...

adding more commands

Now that I *think* I’ve got a handle on the reading portion, I’ve been adding a couple more commands. I added support so that the SX knows what cylinder number it is on.  The F and B commands increase and...

Timeline

I’ve put together a time line of events starting from November 2004, the initial idea.

CLICK THE ABOVE IMAGE FOR A FULL SIZE VERSION.

SX software progress

Welp, since I fine tuned the PC to very reasonable numbers, I figure a small overhaul of the SX code is in order too. I had somewhat of an epiphany working the on the SX, which I haven’t *really* looked at in...

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...

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...

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...

heat problems

As I alluded in an earlier post(s), my SX28 has been pretty warm. After doing a number of different tests, I’ve now ordered an infrared thermometer from amazon for $29.99. I want to find out exactly how hot this...

migrated website to a new host

Over the last week, I migrated this blog to a new hosting provider. GoDaddy was such a pig and the site just ran like molasses when hosted by them. I couldn’t be happier with the switch that I’ve made, but I...

Good news. Floppy now under SX control

OK, so I finally bit the bullet and have the floppy drive under direct SX control. I have my amiga power supply, which is a modified PC supply with harddrive leads powering the drive directly with +12v and +5v.  I also...