Parallel drive (was: USB 5.25" floppy drive - do it

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Thu Jun 10 17:06:09 2004

On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 21:55, Fred Cisin wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Jules Richardson wrote:
> > Not sure if such as a PC parallel port is fast enough to cope with the
> > data rate of a floppy drive and leave enough time for the CPU to do the
> > processing though... but that'd be nice; little more than a cable and a
> > bit of glue logic hooked up to a parallel port that could be quickly
> > swapped between machines.
>
> MicroSolutions (DeKalb IL) in their "BackPack" line, made parallel port
> floppy drives. I have a 2.8M 3.5" from them, but they also made a lot of
> other models.

Good point. I don't know how much work is done in the interface for
those though - quite possibly a microcontroller + some buffer memory. I
also remember taking one of their parallel CDROM units apart a few years
ago and they'd put black gloop on everything so that reverse engineering
was impossible - shame, as I never did get it working with Linux on an
old laptop and might have done so if I knew what it was doing...

I'm not sure what sort of data rate can be shifted through a parallel
port on a reasonably modern PC, so I don't know if it's even possible to
do the whole lot in software. Would be nice though.

cheers

Jules
Received on Thu Jun 10 2004 - 17:06:09 BST