On Fri, 10 May 2013, Phil Tubb wrote:
On Thursday, May 9, 2013 12:29:48 AM UTC-7, Steve Nickolas wrote:I wonder if it would be complicated to design a minimalistic, ProDOS-compatible drive controller for ordinary 1.44 MB drives (for PCs). That would be *my* ideal method of handling software on my //e. -uso.Doesn't this product http://www.bootzero.com/HDDD_A2_v1.2/HDDD_A2v1.2_specifications.html do what you want?
Isn't that just a "Unidisk 5.25" emulation device?I was talking about a ProDOS block device (like CFFA) that used the 1.44 MB floppy drives, somewhat like the other card you mentioned. It would prolly give most of the advantages of a non-3000 CFFA (would be limited to 800K with a currently available patch of DOS 3.3, could use ProDOS to full capacity).
I figured maybe a couple ROMs, a little RAM, a disk controller chip, a cheap microcontroller, on a board with maybe a little glue logic would be all it'd take and wouldn't be all that expensive.
To me, I would believe such a device would be overall cheaper, including the cost of media, than a CFFA - if produced specifically to be inexpensive.
-uso.