TI-H: Re: Possible Floppy Drive Project
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TI-H: Re: Possible Floppy Drive Project
From: "Philip Pesek" <me@philpesek.com>
> Question #1 If I was selling floppy drives for TI-8X calcs, would $50
each
> be too much to ask?
$50 for a floppy drive and calculator adaptor is quite reasonable actually,
but I would suggest selling it without the floppy, as many people already
have spare floppy drives around. This could possably cause compatibility
problems if someone had a screwy floppy, but given how standard floppies
usually are, that shouldn't be much of an issue.
> Question #2 Is there anybody out their who is knowledgable enough in Z80
> ASM to write drivers for such a device if I built the hardware and
provided
> them with a comm. protocol for the port? If so, would you?
Better to ask on the programming lists probably. IMO, the best way to
build your controller would be to build on the work of others.
Specifically, the guys who wrote the expander drivers. They already
work, and you won't have to get some programmer to commit to many
hours of work coding new drivers to a new interface. Instead he
just has to adapt code to handle the differing capacity (which, if
the drivers were well written, should be fairly easy).
On your end you just have to insulate the software from the hardware
and make the floppy disk conform to the same interface the expander
provides. You could either just treat the floppy like a big chunk
of paged memory (which is what the expander uses, IIRC), or you could
implement a FAT12 file system on it, making it easily compatible with
computers.
DK
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