I recall, perhaps 10 years ago, an article (Popular Electronic ?) which
outlined a project to build a ROM virtual disk.  As I remember it had a mess
of "small" EPROMs. Today I'm sure you could slim it down quick a bit with
large EPROM and even Flash components.  I imagine the protocol which allowed
it to function is still valid today, I don't believe the standard has
changed much since 1986.  I may have a copy of the article if you're
interested.

MEE

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Koffman [mailto:listsjosh@3MTMP.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 6:58 PM
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: [PIC]:floppy emulation?


I think you will find that emulating a floppy drive is going to be
rather hard. I'd really look at your application though. I know you want
this to be as bulletproof as possible, but remember, the floppy drive is
only used to load the ramdisk. So, it should really only be accessed on
a reboot. How often are you going to reboot your machine? You can get
single board computers that have a solid state based boot memory, and I
believe you can get emulation cards that plug into regular computers. I
think you may have more luck working with some sort of existing
solution. That said, if you do get it working, please let us know :)

Josh

--
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete
fools.
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"Ken , VK7KRJ" wrote:
>
> Hi, I checked the archives and the only mention I can find re. emulating a
> floppy with a pic and some eeprom was back in 1998. Has anyone any updates
> on this- I want to replace the floppy drive on my linux router project pc,
> this runs in ramdisk and boots from a single 1.44 floppy so if I can
replace
> the (mechanical) floppy with a solid-state "virtual" floppy it leaves the
> power supply fan as the only mechanical thing to wear out, which has to be
> good news for something that will be running 24/7.
>
> Cheers, Ken, vk7krj@southcom.com.au

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