HI Phil, Sorry, I guess "dead" was a little harsh. Sorry for that. I'm glad to know that it's still alive. I appreciate your reply and I'd love to have a DiscFerret board (actually, if I could request two, that would be great in case I mess one up). I do have a hot air solder station and have done surface mount before so that shouldn't be a problem. I'd be happy to report back as well.
I will email you off-list. Santo On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 8:45 AM, Philip Pemberton <classic...@philpem.me.uk> wrote: > On 13/10/16 11:39, Santo Nucifora wrote: > > Hi Eric, > > > > First off, thanks for attempting this. I spent last night trying to > > recreate a disk using the CP/M-86 streams I had posted with the Kryoflux > > and failed. I'm going to play with it a little until I can get a working > > reproduction so I would not rely on those Kryoflux streams just yet. I > am > > guessing the only way I can reproduce a disk is through the Kryoflux > > streams written back to a disk but I can't seem to do that. > > > > I noticed that Discferret had a wiki page on the Victor 9000 format. It > > looks like it handled the format but it looks like it is a dead project > and > > I'm guessing you can't get Discferret boards anymore. > > I have about a dozen bare DiscFerret boards in my cupboard if anyone > wants one. > The board house ran them as hot-air levelled instead of silver-plated, > so they need the SMD pads for the RAM and FPGA (and ideally the PIC too) > cleaning with desolder wick before having those parts installed. > Electrically they're fine. > > If you'd prefer to run your own boards (maybe you really like the gold > on purple that OSH Park do?), I have no problem with someone downloading > Eagle, running CAM and uploading the resulting Gerber files to a board > house. Student Me would have appreciated it if you'd have kicked him a > few quid for doing that, but these days... screw it, go have fun. It's > GPLv2 / open hardware. If we ever meet in person, say thank-you. That'll > do. :) > > Heck, go make a box full of DiscFerrets for you and your friends. I'd > actually like to see people getting something out of it more than I'd > like to see money from it :) > > There's even an ATE program (FerretTest) which can give you a rough idea > where to look for bad solder joints and things. Lots of things to help > you DIY boards (though I actually wrote it because I had a run of boards > with solder bridges on the RAM and FPGA which were causing read/write > issues). > > > As far as "dead project" goes, it's only dead in the sense that I have > no inclination to buy parts and assemble boards again. Anyone who's been > following DiscFerret for long enough knows the tale. The record's been > stuck so long it's worn through, so I won't repeat it :P > > > Regarding the API and microcode, they're not "dead", they're "stable"! I > can't think of anything else to add. What more does it need than read > and write? Tell me! > > > TL/DR: it was a university final year project that kinda escaped the > lab. I'm glad you all still like it and talk about it. I never saw that > coming. > > > Cheers, > -- > Phil. > classic...@philpem.me.uk > http://www.philpem.me.uk/ >