On 2023-05-25 5:52 a.m., Tony Duell via cctalk wrote:
On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 1:54 AM Mike Stein via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
I realize he's a bit eccentric, (even more so than many of us ;-) ), but I
I am not 'a bit eccentric'. There is absolutely nothing mild about my
eccentricities!
But it sounds like he'll explore one of the flux-transition gizmos; good
luck, Tony, and I hope you enjoy the experience!
I've got a Greaseweazle V4 now. I haven't got the software working yet
and I am treading carefully as an early attempt managed to mangle the
drivers for my USB-RS232 cable which I depend on for a lot of work but
I suspect I will get it working in the end and it will do what I need.
At least it's open-source so I can read the software source code
(maybe I'll have to learn Python). And I have schematics.
What is odd is how many things were _not_ suggested. For example :
A RPi can read files off a USB stick. Hang a floppy controller chip,
possibly with buffer RAM, off the user port connector of one of those.
Come up with a parallel interface between an RPi user port and
ISAbus. Use that to transfer the disk images to a classic PC and go
from there.
It is not unheard-of for classic PCs -- even ISAbus ones -- to have
10Mbps ethernet. Most, if not all, 100Mbps ethernet ports will fall
back to that. So use that to transfer the disk image. A disk image is
almost certainly less than a megabyte for a classic machine, so it
won't take long.
USB interfacing is hard, but SD cards are a lot simpler. So use a card
reader thing to transfer the files to an SD card and design an
interface for that to ISA bus.
CF cards are essentially the same interface as PATA (IDE) disk drives.
Go from there.
Just about any of those would have been easier and more likely to use
bits from my junk box/computer collection than trying to get an old,
but not too old, PC
-tony
Would it be possible to build a small computer, 8088/8086
just for this?
