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

Success!@#

I hestitate to jump to conclusions, but I think I just passed a crucial first step in getting this to work!@#!# After adjusting some timing on my new code on the SX, I’ve found my first 0x4489 0x4489 pattern. This...

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...

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...

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.

Changes to the PC side

With more and more things pointing to the PC, I’ve decided to really reduce the amount of work the PC has to do in its receive loop. I looked at Marco’s because his was designed to run (albeit in dos/dos...

merging USB receive

Well, I’ve managed to merge the USB receive portion into the main program that reads and processes tracks.  This means I no longer need an external program to receive the data, to write it to a file, to read the...

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...

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...

progress on windows side

I put some time into the windows program that makes this whole thing tick tonight.  When I first started this project, I started with Marco’s afr.c, and pared it down to the bare necessities.  Then, I modified...