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...

cleaned up the project

So after banging my head for awhile, things still aren’t working as they had prior to my stepping away from it. What I did last night was to partially dissassemble everything, and rewire a decent portion of it. ...

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...

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...

Latest attempt

Tim mentioned something in the last post regarding SYNC which really had me thinking about how to SYNC the data coming in the drive with the data going to the UART of the USB2SER converter. Then I was thinking, now that...

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...

PC xfer working now, timing in order

Welp I pretty much solved the big problems I encountered over the past couple weeks. Ground issues — turned out I was attaching ground of one interface to Vdd on another interface. That was solved by actually...

Timing image

I just wanted to throw this up here to show an example of how the timing is working on my project. Its working well. Top line is the input signal from the drive. Bottom line is the firing of interrupts, either from the...

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...

still no better

Well I’ve decided that my current approach just isn’t improving the situation. And despite help from a lot of people, I’m no better off than I was a few weeks ago. I happened to stumble upon...