64 replies to this topic

[Stephen]

Wow - now this is looking more appealing!

[Firedawg]

Hey St®yker, how is the testing going?  Did you get the GTIA & ANTIC chips you needed?

Mike

[St(r)yker]

Yes.
Candle help me and sent Antic and GTIA.
Atari 130XE PAL-->NTSC + 320KB

Karin Maxi Drive works with ntsc
Waiting for new versions  rom from Trub and fat driver (+ fix ideplus bios) from Drac030

[Firedawg]

Looking good.  You have a lot going on with getting this device ready.  Much appreciate your efforts!  Thanks for the update.

Mike

[kogden]

I'm interested in a couple of these as well.  Are the PCB's currently for sale?  I would be interested in 2 with the GAL and EPROM.

What kind of transfer speeds can you get out of this?  I would assume it'd be similar to an SDrive running at 127k as far as transfer rates go wouldn't it?  I have piles of 3.5" floppies and a stack of old PC floppy drives.... would love to put them to use.  You could squeeze a lot of 8-bit stuff on a 3.5" floppy.

Another weird question..... I have one of these somewhere:
eBay Auction -- Item Number: 300724345234

With 512 byte sector support, could the Maxi drive read from one?  That would be kinda neat, no need for an SDrive then, one drive with the smartmedia adapter stuffed in it and one with a normal floppy.  I had an old camera that used SmartMedia, still have a couple cards and the floppy adapter.

[zaxon]

LOL i read this topic,ZAXON is a scary nicname... . I only made new design of Karin PCB and i give it to Stryker.  Stryker add few changes to PCB, push people to writing software, made prototype ,and all dirty jobs arround.Full respect.

Anyway , some history, about Zaxon on PCB,

2  other my version of Karin maxi:

First internal kynar version mounting in socket on 6502, made in 2009 :


SMD version,(only wd1772,rom and gal is in DIP, rest of parts is on bottom side,  project is free (gerber for pcb,schematic,part list,all data aviable, just contact me if you have made)

Edited by zaxon, Thu Jun 21, 2012 4:03 PM.

[Pmetzen]

I would also take one if I knew where I could also get a komplete ready cartridge + adaptor PBI here. I have an Atari 800 XL systems PAL.

[Stephen]

kogden, on Wed Jun 20, 2012 7:33 PM, said:

I'm interested in a couple of these as well.  Are the PCB's currently for sale?  I would be interested in 2 with the GAL and EPROM.

What kind of transfer speeds can you get out of this?  I would assume it'd be similar to an SDrive running at 127k as far as transfer rates go wouldn't it?  I have piles of 3.5" floppies and a stack of old PC floppy drives.... would love to put them to use.  You could squeeze a lot of 8-bit stuff on a 3.5" floppy.

Another weird question..... I have one of these somewhere:
eBay Auction -- Item Number: 300724345234

With 512 byte sector support, could the Maxi drive read from one?  That would be kinda neat, no need for an SDrive then, one drive with the smartmedia adapter stuffed in it and one with a normal floppy.  I had an old camera that used SmartMedia, still have a couple cards and the floppy adapter.

I can't say for sure, but since this is a parallel device and doesn't use SIO at all, the transfer speed should be WAY above an SDrive running at 127k.  As an example, the IDE+ under Sparta DOS X 4.45 with screen DMA off can almost break 100kB/sec!

[Larry]

I thought that RWTEST results on a (parallel) Black Box Floppy Board should be indicative, but I'm skeptical of the results.

Double Density Disk, MyDos)  (?)
Write  44122
Read  43152
Ave.   43637

Note: This is just about equivalent to a MyDos ramdisk.  These are more than 50% higher than MyDos with an IDE+2 hard drive and 256-byte sectors.  I've read that PBI code is actually fairly slow, but these figures just don't look right...

Double Density, SDX (?)
Write  85367
Read  98172
Ave. 91770

These results also don't look reasonable to me, since this is with 256-byte sectors, and almost double what I get with a IDE+2 hard drive with SDX and 512-byte sectors.  Also way more than double the results with SDX and 256-byte sectors on the IDE+2.  Perhaps someone can shed some light on this?

Here are IDE+2 RWTEST results for comparison:

MyDos DD-256
Write  21000
Read  28455
Ave.   24727

SDX DD-256
Write  27082
Read  46749
Ave.   36916

SDX DD-512
Read  45661
Write  62332
Ave.  53997

SDX (4.42) evidently cannot format a floppy with 512-byte sectors.  All I get is "Error Formatting."  I unsuccessfully tried several methods to get 512-byte sectors including formatting the floppy on the PC and then writing a directory with SDX.

-Larry

[Rybags]

Some look a bit unrealistic.  With floppy you have the big limitations of RPM and step time.

ie at 300 RPM, at best you're reading an entire track in 1/5th of a second and then you have the stepping/settling delay/rotational latency when waiting for the next track to come in.
Same deal of course with a HDD but track sizes are usually a lot bigger and step/settling times a lot less.

A floppy with 11 x 512 sectors is only 5.5K per track.  Possibly you could get skewed results if the interface buffers tracks and returns the data in one big burst.

You can try for "best case" times by using a batch file under SDX, e.g. something like:

POKE 559,0
RWTEST <parms>
POKE 559,34

Depending on how the interface works you might gain 30% or more speedup.

Edited by Rybags, Sat Jun 23, 2012 12:38 AM.

[kogden]

Stephen, on Fri Jun 22, 2012 4:59 PM, said:

kogden, on Wed Jun 20, 2012 7:33 PM, said:

I'm interested in a couple of these as well.  Are the PCB's currently for sale?  I would be interested in 2 with the GAL and EPROM.

What kind of transfer speeds can you get out of this?  I would assume it'd be similar to an SDrive running at 127k as far as transfer rates go wouldn't it?  I have piles of 3.5" floppies and a stack of old PC floppy drives.... would love to put them to use.  You could squeeze a lot of 8-bit stuff on a 3.5" floppy.

Another weird question..... I have one of these somewhere:
eBay Auction -- Item Number: 300724345234

With 512 byte sector support, could the Maxi drive read from one?  That would be kinda neat, no need for an SDrive then, one drive with the smartmedia adapter stuffed in it and one with a normal floppy.  I had an old camera that used SmartMedia, still have a couple cards and the floppy adapter.

I can't say for sure, but since this is a parallel device and doesn't use SIO at all, the transfer speed should be WAY above an SDrive running at 127k.  As an example, the IDE+ under Sparta DOS X 4.45 with screen DMA off can almost break 100kB/sec!

Yes, PBI is MUCH faster than SIO.  Floppy drives are not nearly as fast as PBI itself however.  Typically floppy drives are somewhere between 125kbit - 500kbit.  Usually actual throughput is on the lower end of that scale.

[St(r)yker]

Final PCB

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[kogden]

St®yker, on Sat Jun 23, 2012 10:48 AM, said:

Final PCB

Looks pretty cool!  Is there any straightforward way to move the board away from the machine like if I wanted to mount it in a drive enclosure?  Either way I still want a couple LOL

[rdea6]

St®yker, on Wed May 9, 2012 1:42 PM, said:

Trub added menu and support 512 .....
Draco wrote a driver for the sdx and you can read floppy disks from the PC and Atari ST ...

Is this driver available anywhere.

[drac030]

Not yet. It will be released with SDX 4.46.