Al Feng wrote, on 5/Oct/10 18:52 | Oct5:
On Tue, 5 Oct 2010 10:52:05 +0300 Petri Pellinen<p...@iki.fi> writes:
Hello everyone,
I received my shiny 23 year old Cumana disk interface for the QL
yesterday and am now trying to wire it up to a 'modern' 3.5" pc
floppy
drive... So far, the results have been mediocre at best. I have
QDOS-formatted a DD floppy on the Q-emuLator but when I hook up the
drive to the Cumana interface on the QL I can't read or format the
floppy disk. The drive is obviously selected when I do a "dir
flp2_"
(or "dir flp3_" depending on whether I use untwisted or twisted
slot
on the cable) because the indicator light in the front panel goes
on
but I get a "not found" error when doing a "dir" and "format
failed"
when trying a "format".
I did a bit of research on the pinouts and it seems that the
"standard
shugart" interface is anything but standard, There seem to be quite
a
few variations of the signal assignments in the machines of the
eighties. One interesting article by a fellow Finn is over here:
http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/diskstepper.html
On Dilwyn's site there is a Cumana manual which does not document
the
pinout on the i/f card and a "Generic disk interface manual" which
does have a pinout diagram. The interesting bit in this diagram is
pin
16 which is listed as "load head" whereas on the pc floppy drives
pin
16 is used for "Motor on B". Even more interestingly, the generic
pinout diagram does *not* have a "motor on" pin at all !
Does anyone know if the pinout in the generic document also applies
for the Cumana interface and whether pin 16 really is "load head"
on
the QL?
If this is indeed the case and there is no separate "motor on"
signal
on the QL interface then I guess I need to do a bit of wiring to
enable "motor on" when I get a "drive select" signal.
FWIW. I think that you will probably be able to FORMAT the 3.5" disk via
the Cumana interface if you _cover_ the indexing hole and thereby ensure
that the dumb device isn't confused when it tries to format the HD disk
as a 720K disk ...
He said he above was using a DD disk.
Tony
(edited to make it top quoting)
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