Central Point Option floppy controller

From: Dwight Elvey <elvey_at_hal.com>
Date: Wed Sep 15 16:54:17 1999

Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com> wrote:
>
> The Scenix SX18 and SX28 parts, which are enhanced clones of the PIC16C5x
> family, have a "turbo" mode that is fully pipelined, so most instructions
> really do run in one clock cycle (rather than four). Also, they run at
> up to 100 MHz. They would be much more suitable for implementing a
> floppy disk controller.

Hi
 I don't see why one couldn't also go with one of the
general purpose DSP chips. These make fine high speed
embedded controllers. There is even a 218x version
by Analog Devices that is designed to do DMA transfers
with a host bus. Just ignore the fact that is says
signal processing and just see it as processing.
I would think one could make one of these do Apple
decoding as well as any of the formats like FM
and MFM. One could even do the M2FM used on many
of the older ISIS disk. One could even make have it programmable.
 If anyone is interested in fiddling with this idea,
I have hacked the DSP used on the Cardinal/Digicom
softmodem that they sold about 4-5 years back. One
could easily adapt this board to do floppy controls.
Dwight
Received on Wed Sep 15 1999 - 16:54:17 BST