Joe,
That makes quite a bit of sense, and how I remember the cabling as
well. I need to make a suitable cable to go from the drive controller
to the option board it would seem. The issue is probably whether or not
the cable has a twist - I would assume it would NOT, since the standard
floppy cable would take care of that.
I've been meaning to set the Option Board up once my PC is back
together, and saw this picture on Ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2034301058
Looking at the stylized picture on the manual cover, it appears the OB
is replacing the drive controller. Needless to say this doesn't mean
much. I think it's safe to assume that the controller sits between the
drives and the OEM controller.
Would anyone happen to have a manual that could confirm our suspicians?
Thanks,
Jeff
On Wed, 2002-06-26 at 15:50, Joe wrote:
> Jeff,
>
> I used to have one of these so I'll try to answer your questions as best as I can remember. It goes between the regular disk controller and the floppy drives. I *believe* you remove the cable from the existing disk controller and plug it into the card edge connector on the Option card (that preserves any cable twists and drive addresssing) and then installed a supplied cable between the edge connector of the existing controller and the row of pins on the Option board. Yes, it can handle two drives. In fact, IIRC it will handle four drives if your system can handle four drives on a single cable. It does NOTHING during normal system operation. But when you run the Central Point SW it completely takes over control of the drives and copies (or edits) ANYTHING on the disk that the drive can physically access including all the stuff that MS-DOS and standard drive controllers can't access. You can access 40+ tracks (as many as 43 depending on the drive) and you can copy, access!
> , edit the address blocks, CRC blocks, etc etc. It can even simulate a laser burned spot or weakly magnetized sectors on a disk. Both of these were commonly used anti-disk copying gimmicks. I never found a copy protected disk that I couldn't duplicate with the Option card. I wish I''d keep mine.
>
> Joe
>
> At 06:17 PM 6/26/02 -0400, you wrote:
> >
> >
> >Central Point Deluxe Option board: I don't recall how this card is
> >supposed to interface with the disks. There is a card edge connector
> >and a row of pins on the board. Does the board go inbetween the FDC and
> >drives, or does it replace the floppy controller entirely? Any special
> >cabling required, and can it run two drives?
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Jeff
> >
> >
> >
>
Received on Wed Jun 26 2002 - 18:48:31 BST