Universal floppy disk controller

[Dwight K. Elvey]

Hi
 The external boxes that have tape drives would have to have
a FDC in them. These tape drives were designed to be paralleled
with the wires to a floppy. I'd suspect that the older ones
may have the right kind of controller but may have a clock speed
issue.
Dwight


>From: "Jules Richardson" <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>
>
>On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 12:42 -0500, Barry Watzman wrote:
>> This might be the answer to being able to access 5.25" drives on a "modern"
>> PC.  
>
>Semi-related, but I took one of their backpack CDROM interfaces apart a
>few years ago - it was all totally custom ICs inside, plus I know
>Microsolutions wouldn't publish any details on the control protocol. I
>expect you'll find the same thing with the floppy drive version.
>
>> It would be really cool if 22Disk would work with a drive connected to
>> this thing. 
>
>I *expect* it's a pretty standard FDC chip and a bit of buffer / control
>parallel-port interface circuitry implemented on a custom chip - I doubt
>they'd go to the trouble of buffering raw tracks etc. and using the
>associated memory to do that. Which means you're probably limited to the
>same MFM formats that a normal PC FDC is capable of, and nothing more.
>
>Linux *might* support the backpack floppy drive; I can't remember...
>
>cheers
>
>Jules
>
>