Jay Maynard wrote:
What it really needs is more memory and a USB port. A bigger/faster microcontroller could do wonders with that box. The right programming would even allow it to look like a USB storage device to the PC, eliminating the need to run special software on the PC side - and even allow file transfers by having both sides connected at the same time. (As long as you don't try to write simultaneously.)
I've got a USB design of my own with a 40-pin connector on it. There's no memory on-board, but I was thinking about the possibility of emulating a floppy drive and have the USB chip read sectors from the PC on-demand.
It would be configured as a HID device on the PC, so there'd be no need for drivers as such, just a very simple program to serve sector read/write requests to/from emulator disk images. Presumably that program could be written so it ports relatively painlessly to Mac etc...
Being software, it'd be pretty easy & flexible to support all manner of floppy disk drives (controllers), from the TRS-80 family to the Apple ][ to C64...
Interesting... Regards, -- | Mark McDougall | "Electrical Engineers do it | <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> | with less resistance!"