giobbi
Veteran Member
I looked up the Osborne tech manual and realized how bad the design was:
The floppies get power over the data cable - That's +5 and +12. So to swap drives you would have to make a modified 34 pin cable. That is to say the +5 and +12 volt lines cut or at least just left out of drive connector and those lines soldered to a standard floppy power cable.
The I/O is memory mapped in bank switched memory so any I/O requires calls to common memory where the I/O port is swapped in before it is read or written to then memory is swapped back to TPA bank.
Both a pain in the ass and a fantastic way to really slow down I/O.
I haven't had time to pull out my Turbo Pascal to write a load program. It would probably be easier to create disks with software on it and mail it to you.
I know that customs would slow it down but you would get more.
Let my know if you have any trouble with the modem software sent to you - If so I will just make a small stack of useful disks to send you.
Ok Randy, thank you; I believe the first floppy will be here in few days, customs already processed the parcel.
About FDD: yes, they are different from normal, PC standard, FDD ones.