Patrick Schaefer wrote:
josephoswaldgg@hotmail.com wrote:For a dongle to work, you still need the equivalent of a Woz machine for your microcontroller to talk to the Disk II, and you need enough RAM to store a sector or a track, and enough CPU to de-nibblize or nibble-analyze if you want to handle non-standard disks.You can build the basic Woz machine with a shift register and a prom. As mentioned before, the access timing is critical, but you don't need to use a 6502 - any other controller will do the same job.There are many microcontrollers with USB, and at least the 8051 based should have enough RAM for the de-nibbelizer.Patrick
What would be great is to use a fast(er) microcontroller that has enough time to read whole tracks AND count sync-bits at the same time, so that the whole track, including all sync bits can be transferred to the PC for analysis. Do no decoding of the data on the microcontroller, and instead do it all on the PC. This way all disks, copy-protected or not, can be read!
-- Jerry Penner e-mail: remove the blips and _