2008-08-28

3.5 inch drives and FDC 765

Before I started the mini85 project, I started gathering information on the floppy drives and CP/M interface. I came across this page. It made me aware of a few constraints on my project:
- it would be difficult to find a project with modern day 3.5 inch drives (later I found this one);
- they would not use MFM at 1MHz bit rate to achieve 1.44Mb densities because it is too fast for the processor (13us) and some sort of DMA would be necessary.
I was reading comp.os.cpm and a new yahoo group started for people that would want to build their own CP/M computer. My project was going that way so I joined in, draw up some schematics and started writing code and asking questions.
After initial hardware development and some code, I managed to read and write a 720k floppy on the mini85. To get the best processor speed and least overhead, the 8085 was running at 10.24MHz (2.5% over clocking) and a 8256AH-2 connected to the CLKOUT (@5.12MHz) for the serial interface.
Regarding the interface between the 8085 and the 765, I used no interrupts (although connected) and polled In/Out as the 8085 is perfectly capable of polling the 765's status and reading the data in less than 26us.
I was using a PC to read/write/format a normal HD disk with the hole closed with tape, and I was using DEBUG in MSDOS to write sector on the disk.
As for circuits I tested the one used in prof80 and the one used in the ZX Spectrum +3, in the end I settled for my version of the prof80, i.e. I changed the data separator to a FDC9216 and used a 8MHz clock to the FDC9216 and UPD765, an a 1MHz divider (74LS161) for the 765's WRCLK. I then compromised the 8085 clock to 8MHz so that with a simple change of clock input, either X2 on the 8085 or CLKOUT, I could use 720k or 1.44Mb floppies.

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