Quote:
Originally Posted by cheshirenoir
I keep wondering if it could be the basis for a floppy drive buffer to allow high density floppy drives to be used as Amiga FDDs without modification. Hold the data until Gary / Gayle are ready and trickle it across. Sort of like a buffer.
I assume it's impractical, but, y'know, just putting it out there :-)
Chesh
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Gary in terms of the floppy has nothing to do except simple logic to control motor. Data from Paula can be stored partially (FIFO) in Pico (it has 264KB of RAM where required maximum amount of RAM to buffer whole track is 12.5KB .
One of companies offered similar solution to provide HD floppy for Amiga without special floppy drive that is able to spin with lower speed (150 RPM vs normal 300RPM), they use DRAM as FIFO buffer and principle was easy, track was sent to FIFO - from floppy drive with normal speed and from Amiga with half of speed, introduced latency was approx 100ms (half of track). In fact using Pico as smart FIFO offer possibility to provide very slow (500kbps) HDD (but with DMA). USB or FLASH card (SD etc) can be presented to Amiga as floppy with more than 160 tracks (and perhaps more than 11/22 sectors).