I knew most of this, which is why emulating the floppy controller should be easier.
applesauce is platform specific (ok, ANY floppy emulation will be platform specific for apple) I thought the applesauce page said it was not yet available for standard shugart style as in trs-80, s-100... greaseweasel is platform specific. the color coco is not yet available in the USA, needing shipping from Europe, which in my experience is not cheap. not even promised for trs80 1/3/4 or s-100. and are the parts cheap? dunno. did not know about gcr/mfm on same floppy...if you respond, please mention who does that. gaak, I don't even recognize "gcr" at this point. I remember mfm and something else. mfm was single density, right? was gcr double density? does not seem familiar, but certainly there was a double density encoding scheme that the device attached to the floppy cable would have to recognize. I had forgotten that atari? commodore? changed speed, though I remember I knew that before. <pre>--Carey</pre> > On 02/27/2024 5:18 PM CST Wayne S via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > The “support” channel has the most info on the applesause. > > > Sent from my iPhone > > On Feb 27, 2024, at 15:12, Wayne S <wayne.su...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > Chuck, not to disagree much, because you are an expert, but there’s more to > decoding floppies than just reading them. Some floppies have tracks that are > recorded at different speeds. Some have tracks that use different modulation > gcr on some and mfm on others. A lot of floppies have different skew. The > applesauce tries to handle these problems and give you a readable file. It’s > mostly in the software. > > I tried to send the discord link but don’t know if it got thru so here it is > again > > https://discord.gg/njetE8zU > > Wayne > > > Sent from my iPhone > > On Feb 27, 2024, at 15:02, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> > wrote: > > On 2/27/24 14:42, Wayne S via cctalk wrote: > Take a look at the Applesauce. > It hooks up to a lot of different floppy drives and records and decodes the > flux. > Version2 of the hardware is being sourced and should be available in a few > months. > > Good grief, there are more of these things floating around than one can > shake a stick at. The Greasweazel is perhaps the cheapest, using a $3 > ($1.30 or so from Aliexpress) STM32F103 "Blue Pill" board. > > It's almost trivial doing this if you don't need the "eye candy". > Basically you run a timer in capture mode, with capture triggered by an > edge on the drive's "read data" line. > > Modern MCUs don't even break a sweat doing this. > > It's nice seeing the proliferation after many years of harping on the > subject... > > --Chuck
