Re: Poor-man's Catweasel

[mwillegal <mike@willegal.net>]

I'm pretty far along on a "smart" version for DIsk ][ drives,
formatted in DOS 3.3 format.
http://www.willegal.net/appleii/appleii-disk-int.htm.

Note that properly formatting a disk and/or writing to individual
sectors on a disk demands knowing and decoding the disk format on the
fly.

I don't record raw state transitions, but I suppose I could go back
and do another version in the future, if I thought it would be of some
use.

Regards,
Mike Willegal

On Feb 5, 11:05 pm, Alex Freed <alex_n...@mirrow.com> wrote:
> > On Feb 5, 9:40 pm, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Has anyone seen this?
>
> >>http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=40959
>
> >> Basically it's a universal floppy-disk decoder/writer hosted on an Atmel
> >> prototype board.  Fascinating (to me, anyway) thread on development and bringup.
>
> >> Just waiting for an Apple 2 personality!
>
> Good timing. Just when I was thinking of using the AVR for a somewhat
> similar purpose :)
>
> This project is very interesting. It should be trivial to use it for
> reading Apple disks, both 5.25" and 3.5" with small changes to the
> existing software. If it captures *all* the flux changes with good
> resolution, it's a "simple matter of software" to use it for capturing
> data from floppies. At the same time there are enough pins left to
> interface to a Disk ][ card and emulate an Apple floppy.
>
> Here is how I see it. You connect a standard disk drive and capture raw
> data via USB to a PC. A PC program analyzes the data and stores in some
> format (TBD) on an SD card on the same board. USB is disconnected,
> another 20 pin ribbon cable plugged into a Disk ][ card and a floppy is
> emulated.
>
> -Alex.