Floppy Drives
Santo Nucifora
Hi all. Can anyone use these?-- Charlie Springer
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Charles Springer
Me me!
On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 3:15 PM Charles Springer <charles....@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all. Can anyone use these?-- Charlie Springer
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Jonathan Gevaryahu
Hi all. Can anyone use these?-- Charlie Springer
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I might be interested in messing with one, if they have the same
sort of drive MCU inside that the later canon cat drives did, but
clearly the cables to the drives aren't the same as the canon cat
ones, so they won't work as a drive swap without some extra work.
-- Jonathan Gevaryahu jgeva...@gmail.com jgeva...@hotmail.com
dwight
I think these are just regular floppies. The major difference, other that wire scambling is that the Cat has the power in the cable. These are older floppy drives these typically had the drive ready, needed for the Cat's software.
The Cat used single sided, because it expected to save only a single RAM image. Not having a full possible RAM there wasn't a need to have a double sided drive.
Dwight
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2018 1:01:13 PM
To: cano...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [Canon Cat] Floppy Drives
Santo Nucifora
I think these are just regular floppies.
Hannu Aronsson
Jonathan Gevaryahu
It might be the same drive as the production cat (with the same flawed plastic head rail spacer which requires a metal retrofit to prevent the drive from self-destructing), but even if it is, it has a different cable. The cat drives use a flexible flat cable, while the iai swyft prototypes used a standard 34 pin mini-shugart floppy cable.
AFAIK from looking at source code, the cat does depend on the /READY signal on pin 34, so a drive which does /DISKCHG on pin 34 will probably not work.
(this is assuming /DISKCHG goes active when a disk is ejected
from the drive or inserted (as detected by the write protect
sensor optical sensor detecting a sudden change active to inactive
or vice versa), and goes inactive after /STEP is pulsed once)
I ASSUME (not having the MCU contents from the cat's floppy drive; if someone has a DEAD cat floppy drive with a destroyed head that can be used for science, let me know!) that the /READY signal is pulled low/asserted when:
/DRIVESEL1 (pin 12) is low/active
ANDthe drive detects that there is a disk currently inserted (with a
microswitch or optical sensor)
AND
the index sensor on the spindle motor has detected at least two (three?) pulses with the appropriate RPM time between each one, meaning the disk is rotating at the correct speed (this implies /motoron (pin 16) is low/active, but it is possible the /ready signal also requires /motoron to be low)
and is de-asserted/left floating if any of the above is not true.
dwight
Hi
As Jonathan says, the disk change will not work. Most newer drives no longer have the drive ready circuit. The controller determines the ready status by either data clocking on the data line or the index pulse. One could make a one shot from a 555 and pulse the drive ready signal low for at least one index pulse time ( needs to be retriggerable ).
As for the cabling, it is not that complicated. The schematic is available for the Cat. It wouldn't take much to make a proper cable.
As I've said before, if you have a Cat with a working drive, stop using it and fix the guide rail before the drive is damaged!!
Dwight