
Adding a Hard Drive to an Original IBM PC Using a Raspberry Pi - bane
http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/244/adding-a-hard-drive-to-an-original-ibm-pc-using-a-raspberry-pi
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gaius
Very nice. The parts that usually fail are the HD or the PSU in old kit, most
of the rest of it should basically last forever, so long as you can craft
replacements from modern components, you'll still be running that old box in
50 years.

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jhallenworld
One of my on-hold projects is an FPGA-based floppy controller (that is, my own
version of the 8272). I wanted to make an FPGA-based computer that could talk
to a real floppy drive. The interesting point is to make the MFM data
encoder/decoder plus DPLL for clock recovery.

I got as far as 3.3v to 5.v interface logic, plus acquired logic analyzer
traces of real floppy data patterns.

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jlawer
Due to the speed limitation of the Serial interface, I wonder if you could run
the 3com card with low enough resources to do the emulation. Not real
networking, I am thinking more of embedding requests into raw ethernet packets
with a direct ethernet link to a Raspberry Pi, and some stuff on the RPi?

Alternatively the Printer port supported 8bit parallel transfers are was much
much faster. Potentially a USB -> Parallel interface on the Pi. I remember
using a Parallel to Parallel cable between 2 486s with the lap link software
and getting MUCH faster then serial connection.

Pretty cool.

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jhallenworld
Also, it's pretty easy to make a wire-wrapped ISA-bus card.. I would try to do
this. One 22v8 GAL for the address decoder :-) I would make a some kind of
FIFO interface- don't bother with DMA, it's very slow.

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fit2rule
The microcontroller that is in the disk-emulating hardware I use to keep my
Oric-1 collection running, is faster/better/stronger than the CPU in the Oric
itself.

In that regard, Oric recently caught up with the C64. ;)

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digi_owl
Ars Technica had a similar article recently about getting a TRS-80 model 100
online.

There the Pi end up acting as a terminal server (if i get the terminology
correct) via a serial-to-USB setup.

