Project idea: Use real floppy disk ;-)

[petersieg]

Just an idea. I probably will not have the will/time/knowledge to realize this.

There is this nice floppy controller with arduino: https://github.com/dhansel/ArduinoFDC/tree/main
Together with Babelfish, it looks possible to create a Gigatron aware floppy.

Also on Raspberry Pi Pico something is available: https://community.element14.com/product ... controller

Could be fun, to load gt1 files from a real floppy (and probably write (basic) files back to it.

Just an idea.

best, Peter

[lb3361]

If I had the time, I would use the RP2040 version and program it to act as a SPI device obeying a subset of the SD card protocol. Then the SPI browser would work out of the box.

As for writing to the floppy, I always meant to add an OS layer and writing support to the SPI SD interface. The idea is to locate the OS code in bank3 of a 128k gigatron. Here are a couple ideas for an os interface at https://github.com/lb3361/gigatron-os/b ... /oscall.md. I never had a long enough piece of time to do this seriously. Then one has to modify TinyBasic and MSBASIC to save/load using this interface. Any takers?

[petersieg]

Maybe helpful information:
http://www.dejazzer.com/ee379/lecture_n ... d_card.pdf
http://elm-chan.org/docs/mmc/mmc_e.html
https://github.com/picosonic/bbc-fdc
http://virtualfloppy.blogspot.com/2013/ ... disks.html

Just a ready to use project - one side spi sd card interface - other floppy disk (or hard disk?), I could not find.

best, Peter

[lb3361]

It seems that there is a promising path using the Adafruit floppy interface https://www.adafruit.com/product/5679 and a Raspberry Pico because they also provide a nice controller library https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Floppy/ with read support (write support seems to be under development). One could then write a raspberry pico program that takes SD-card like commands on a SPI port and executes them on the floppy (one of their example takes USB commands instead of SD-card SPI commands, that's close!)