I would be interested in developing that. It would be kinda fun. Kinda hack a floppy from the reading point before. Thinking of using a serial memory stick. Its small, and replaceable. What the interest in the forum: PIC Edge Connector Serial Memory Connector. Write Protect comes from serial flash. Looks to system like a 3.5 inch floppy, but solid state. Havent seen from my search any code that lets the pic do this. Least from the floppy interface side, anyone seen anything like this. At 04:37 PM 5/10/00, you wrote: > >Just make the Flash sit there and look (to the on-motherboard FDC) like > >it IS a (small) floppy drive. Add a 4-pin power connector and far as > >the machine knows, it has a write-protected Floppy in the drive. The > >FDD is a lot dumber, easier to reverse engineer part than the FDC, > >methinks, and FDC's are pretty universal (Also, you don't eat up a > >sometimes non-existent ISA slot - you don't have to deal with PCI - > >etc.) > >The problem here is that you need to have the data come out as a serial bit >stream with a properly appended CRC code. the data also needs to be >encoded as a >MFM data stream. If the PIC does the parallel -> serial conversion, I >suppose it >would be practical to append a couple of bytes of precalculated CRC to the >data >sector in the flash, but this would then mean a fancy calculation to find the >start of the next sector. > >I was envisioning the PIC having registers for track and sector, and then just >parallel transferring the data to the host, and setting a register to say >error >free reading. Voila, no rotational latency. With the serial transfer you would >always have to transfer a full "rotation" of data as you would not know which >sector the host required.