GreaseWeasle and ST506 MFM (or perhaps RLL) Interface?

[4920441]

Hi,
since the first ST506 MFM drives are very similar to MFM Floppy drives of the era, do you think it'd be possible to adapt the greaseweasle for reading such old MFM drives as well?

The main thing would be the configuration for the stepper motor since it has way more tracks than a standard floppy, and some electric wizadry to connect it.
The rest should be possible in Software, based on your work.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

4920441

[keirf]

You can usually step these old drives like floppy drives at 3ms/step. It's only when you want to step faster that you need to then wait for completion acknowledgement from the drive, which buffers the step commands and processes them at an optimal rate with acceleration and deceleration.

So all you need in that case is to be able to raise the limit of max cylinder in firmware. I can help you with that if you want to be able to do so programatically using the normal firmware build (rather than a special hacked build).

[janrinze]

Sounds really cool if that works. My old harddisks may be already dead by now but who knows. I definitely will try this out if there is a working setup!