I was looking at buy the drive interface on ebay but went a way bit out of my price range.

Found all the schems on the web and asked my design guy in work how hard would it be to build a board with Floppy, EPROM, ETHERNET and RAM for my Enterprise

So i was wondering if anybody is interested?

send me an email at joolz@rsd.tv with what you would like and i will collate and see if we can get something built.

joolz

something like this http://torlus.com/floppy/ for the Enterprise?

This is only replace the floppy drive, the floppy controller also needed.

For using SDCARD or anything else, not needed a EXDOS card! Only the EXDOS software!
EXDOS= Enterprise eXpandable Disk Operating System!

If you connect anyway anything to the Enterprise, just need to write the low level access routines, and make a EXDOS expansion which can handle Sector Read/Write access. That's all!

Some limitation: at the EXDOS birth time only the FAT12 standard exist, the EXDOS use this. This is limit a drive size to 65536 sectors. Bigger drives can be handled with partitons, this is task of the EXDOS expansion what you write.
(I working on EXDOS disassembly in the future will come FAT16 suported version...)

Current EXDOS ROMs can not started without the WD177x, because a little bug at the Floppy low level routines, is neverending waiting for the WD Ready state. But just write one 00h to the ROM, if you want to use without floppy hw.
(In the future will fix this, one version will work both with or without floppy hw.) 

Btw how can I do this, eg creating some kind of ROM which holds code for the low level stuffs?

Yes, needed to make a standard EXOS Extension ROM, which is answer for the EXDOS question 'who want to make a new drives?'
Just give back how many drives and where is the low level routines. The EXDOS will sort out the drive letters, started from F:
Can be used more than one expansion, only barrier: Z is the last drive letter

Hello,

first of all Sorry for my bad english, i am from germany.

Mine is not the best either, as I am from Hungary

I think, maybe i am wrong, with the Software and The Cable CBM-MFT you can use the SD2IEC Interface.

Look at this thread: http://enterpriseforever.com/summaries_from_the_hungarian_topics/using_commodore_peripherals_with_enterprise-t262.0.html

I use the SD2IEC with my VIC-20 and is great.

So maybe we can use SDCARD with the Enterprise.

Mike

Yes, SD2IEC is a device which emulates some commands of the CBM-DOS and the IEC serial protocol used to interface with CBM machines and drives. However it's quite slow SD2IEC's firmware knows some turbo mode like JiffyDOS, but I don't think it would be too easy to port JiffyDOS' software to Enterprise [JiffyDOS is quite timing sensitive, eg even DTV has a modofied version which is aimed C64 compatibility, try to imagine then a ported version, with rewirtten into Z80 code, etc] Because it needs custom software in both of the drive (it's emulated by SD2IEC, ok), and the computer. So with some hw you mentioned before, it would work, but painfully slow, compared to the speed EP users are used with floppy disks. Afaik/Imho of course

I'm just thinking about "playing" with an SD reader for EP. EP has the advantage over CBM machines that its OS is quite full featured and extendable: on C64 a device like IDE64 needs major effort to write a modified KERNAL to be able to use it with some softwares at least. The other way is SD2IEC's way: emulate the interface and protocol on hw level, which is also not so easy, and though it's not a problem if you buy it (and not build/design/etc) but quite slow. In contrast, EP's EXDOS is very extendable and as far as I was told by "master Zozo" it's really easy to have a totally different block device and use as an EXDOS drive: basically you need only write the low level block read/write code for your quite simple hw (as you don't need to be "compatible" with anything just with your very own code) and it works as an original EXDOS card with disk drive, etc. Though I am in love with CBM machines, I have to admit that EP has very nice hw design (just compare C64's memory layout/banking with the elegant solution EP uses) and sw as well (extensible OS, no need to "hack" the original for new functions etc).

Afaik SD card can be handled with quite simple "bit banging", almost you can hook up it directly to EP, maybe it would be slow, and uC is need to interface SPI bus (which is basically SD cards are using). Anyway, I can imagine it's still faster than the standard IEC protocol ........

Is possible to rebuild the original floppy interface?

I have some cards available, if you interested.

Hi Zozo,

I am still after a Floppy interface and Spectrum Emulator, if there are any going.

I have found an Emulator on Ebay but we will see what kind of price this gets to.

 

Russ