home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- This posting is in response to the ever increasing number of people who
- want to hook a 80-track 5.25" drive to their ST, but want to read 40-track
- IBM-PC diskettes as well. Once upon a time (in 1986) the german magazine
- c't published a solution called the step doubler. I recently build that
- circuit and am now happily reading and writing 360K MSDOS diskettes
- as well as making backups of my hard disk to cheap 5.25" diskettes holding
- 800K of data each. Below you'll find an UUENCODEed and ARCed Degas Elite
- PI3-picture showing that circuit.
- *** No warranty implied: If you fry your ST or drive you're on your own. ***
- Note 1: Most 5.25" drives do step flawlessly at 3 ms but won't be able to
- do 2 steps in 3 ms. That's why one should lengthen the step time of the
- switched 5.25" drive to 6 ms. This is done by changing some low memory
- variables, which should be mentioned in the Abacus books. I remember that
- these addresses even drifted along USENET a long time ago. I actually don't
- need to do that, because my Philips X3134 is capable of doing 2 steps in 3 ms!
- Note 2: While having a hot soldering iron you should add some open collector
- TTL drivers (a 7407 is fine) to the following 3 signal lines:
- Pin 2: Side select
- Pin 5: Drive 0 select
- Pin 6: Drive 1 select
- These lines are driven by unbuffered outputs of the Yamaha sound chip that
- isn't capable of driving heavy loads and may easily be damaged. All other
- outgoing lines on the floppy port are sufficiently buffered.
-
- Have fun, Michael.
-
- /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\
- Michael Doerr, Uni. of Kaiserlautern, Germany --- uunet!unido!uklirb!mdoerr
- /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\ /|\
-
-