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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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simplified ISR

It looks as if I spoke too soon. I’m still having reading problems.  The data used to be forced into an MFM mold, but all that’s done in some cases, is to further corrupt the corrupt data. I rewrote my ISR...

proof of concept works

Today is the first day in months that I’ve made what I consider good progress. I am now able to read any track(so far) off of any disk with 100% success including checking and relying on the checksums. I read...

new design

I took David’s advice, and I rewrote the code last night. Some highlights: 1. ISR is entirely in assembly. Although I haven’t manually counted, it appears to be about 400ns in length. 2. ISR triggers only...

more real world tests

So tonight, I put my new FPGA implementation of the amiga floppy project to good use.  I read some more of my collection of amiga floppies. GREAT NEWS. It’s working like a champ.  As a matter of fact, I selected...

data rate vs throughput

Although I’m transmitting from the Parallax SX microcontroller to the PC via USB at a data rate of 2mbps, the actual throughput is much less.  First, there is some overhead, namely start and stop bits, which is...

first two bytes of checksum bad

Despite the data being received 100% correct, the data checksum fails in certain cases. It’s always the first two bytes of the 4-byte, 32-bit checksum that are wrong.  The last two are always right.  What does...

redesign of read routine

After skimming the patent I referenced in the earlier post, I’m starting to come to the realization that in order to have an effective floppy controller, I need to implement a decent PLL which can better track the...