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

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...

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...

new pictures

 

As you can see above, we have a “10” (4 us), another “10”(4 us) and a “1000”(8 us) chunks of data.  Little noisy there.

Logicport screenshots and project file

I thought this might be neat to put up. Sorry about the high-res image but you lose too much when it compresses it. Click here for the screenshot. Also, I uploaded the .LPF project file which can be viewed for free with...

new book

I recently received “On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore” and have read about half of the book so far.  Very interesting read.  It’s fun to read about how the various Commodores...

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...

PC might be the problem!

I think I’ve found at least one problem here. My PC is at least one problem. Even though I’ve done extensive tests with the PC in the past, including measuring a 9us total cycle time, it appears the PC must...

more hardware

When in doubt, just throw some more money at the problem! 🙂 Actually, I’m kidding. But I do have the Parallax USB2SER on its way — maybe the USB will be much faster, buffered, and more reliable. Those...

MFMSanityCheck

While I’m hesitant to post this at all, this is a quick and dirty application I threw together, and I do mean threw, that will check for valid MFM bytes. See the previous post for the link to the actual bytes. It...

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.