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

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...

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...

current read problems

It seems as though when I have a read problem, its normally minor, and is a single bit error. I notice that the errors have a tendency for 0s to be incorrectly interpreted as 1s. So I get AB instead of 2B, AB instead of...

revisited memory routines

I was looking over my reading and writing routines. Minimums for the fram are Clock high min. 28ns Clock low min. 28ns Data setup min 5ns I write in two places: First, when bits are coming in from the drive, and the ISR...

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...

followup on speed of inpout32

Welp, did some testing last night, and no, it doesn’t look like inpout32 is really going to be any faster. Damn shame because it was relatively easy to setup and use. Quick reply from the authors(thank you) who...

first real world tests

Well I tried to read about 70 disks in via my project tonight. I had mixed results. First, the Teac loves HD media but doesn’t fare as well with LD media. The Samsung hates HD media, but does very well with LD...

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...

going around the problem

Welp, I’ve ordered a new, but cheap ($5.99!) regular PC floppy drive from newegg.com.  I like this end result much better anyways.  PC drives are much more available, popular, cheap, and so on. was worried about...

Timeline

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

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