Alex Freed wrote:
"Later Days Apples Pseudo-disk" proudly presented by (previously unheared
of) Bronze Age Computing.
A while ago I wrote about my experimental MMC/SD interface that could look
to Apple 2 either as a ProDOS
storage device or as a DISK ][.
Took a while to iron out some glitches. Not sure all of them are gone, but I
feel the device is stable enough to
be presented to the world.
See http://mirrow.com/FPGApple/pseudodisk.html for details. Yes, the page is
rather primitive.
I swear my Verilog is better than my HTML :)
In a nutshell the board can act as a ProDOS disk or a DOS 3.3 disk. Or DOS
3.2 if you load such a nibble image.
I didn't run too many tests, but all the .nib files I tried seem to work.
Of course it works much faster in ProDOS mode. Takes about 2 seconds from
cold start to a BASIC program loaded
under ProDOS. By contrast the DOS 3.3 image takes 9 seconds to load DOS and
Integer BASIC from a .nib image.
It can be made a bit faster with some modifications to the firmware (Atmel
AVR program written in "C").
Of the 3 chips on the board (not counting the 3.3V regulator) all 3 are
programmable: the CPLD, the 6502 driver and the
AVR code.
Last time a few people expressed interrest in the design. Now is the time to
decide if pseudo-disk is to become a product.
I made 6 prototype boards. I'm keeping 3 for my 3 Apples: (2+, 2e and GS).
The other 3 are available.
If they are claimed and there are at least a few more pre-orders I'll make a
small "production" run. The 3 current boards do not have a solder mask, but
they have extra prototyping space for mods.
Imagine what they will be worth on ebay in 30 years :))
The MSRP is $100 per board. Another $15 buys you (at cost) an SD card with a
few pre-loaded images.
--
-Alex.
Greetings,
I'd be interested in something like this but my biggest question would
be how would I go about transferring the disk images from my Mac Mini
to the SD card? I'm assuming the SD card would be ProDOS formatted, so
I'm not even sure if the Mini would recognize it without trying to
format it.