Bit of CP/M trivia needed

[Dwight K. Elvey]

>From: "Allison" <ajp166 at bellatlantic.net>
>
---snip---
>
>The DSD880 and RX01/02 drives are of a similar design with a local 
>CPU (crude TTL logic state hardware or 2901s) to do all the heavy
>lifiting at that floppy interface end with a trivial interface 
>to the processor bus.  Neither include boot logic.
>
>As to DMA on FDCs well SMC did one that had it but it was a PITA
>to use as every bus is differnt and timing plus control signals 
>required a lot of work to integrate.  Most FDCs were trying to be 
>generic and to keep die size down (hence cost) things were not
>done that would make the chip system specific. 
---snip---

Hi Allison
 It is interesting that they didn't include this.  
On my machine it isn't even more hardware. There
is just one instruction in the state machine to
load a sector count of 1. It then just does a normal
read. Every thing else is just default reset values
from the reset line. I remember thinking how trivial
it was. I can understand that if the controller needed
to know things like density, this might require more
but it is a simple operation that could be easily
added to any that have a state machine to run
the controller operations. I can see why the FDC
chips don't do this. There is a lot to setup but
still, a default reset state could have easily
provided the needed inital values.
 As I recall, the board has a jumper to not do the
auto boot. I think the auto boot is a cool thing.
Also, yes it is rare.
Dwight