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...

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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...

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...

new design on SX software

Welp, I’m having trouble tweaking my existing SX code. If I modify the timing of the current code, I’m getting all garbage output — even adjusting small amounts to one side or the other, produces much...

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...

new book

I picked up a copy of Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering this past weekend. I have about 5 or 6 chapters read. All very good. It was published April 2005 or thereabouts, and so its much more updated than the book...

more SX to PC tests

Although I think I’ve long had this working good, I did some more tests just to verify. Latest numbers: Each cycle is about 15.8us, 2us per bit, 8 bits, this sounds fine. This does confirm, however, what I...

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...

writing merged USB comm code

Now that I have USB receive working in the main PC code, its time to merge the USB transmit(and receive for commands) into the main SX code. I have two pseudo-code versions written. 1> First version uses the ISR to...