🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>unfortunately the complexity of the circuits has gotten to be where
>>>you pretty much consider it to all be FM ([deleted word] Magic) You just
deal
>>>with what goes into the magic black box and what comes out and don't
>>>worry about how it does what it does inbetween.

Well then you may like to know that I'm kind of interested in trying to
design a microprocessor, or at least a game-enhancing chip.  I probably
won't ever get past emulating the electronic circuits on a computer, but I
might actually design it with the transistors I have from broken electronic
devices, and my electronics lab kits.  I also have a few farily simple chips
(like quad AND gates and 8-bit flip flop) that I might use to reduce the
physical size of my experiment.

>> >I bet it's
>>>been 10 years since I've used an 8 inch floppy! Those things hard or
>>>soft sectored???
>>
>>Hard I'm pretty sure. IBM first came out with them 1971, but they were
>>pretty much made obsolete after 1976, I think that's when IBM came up with
>>the 5 1/4. I don't think I even have anything to read them with though :)
>>
>
>Some of the older CP/M stuff I've played with used them and I think
>the TRS-80 model 2 might have used soft sectored ones. I heard in the
>last days of them they had the soft sectored ones up to a fairly
>decent capacity but I forget how much. Seems to me it was like 200K or
>300K or better.
>
>>>Depending on how much wear is on them and the storage
>>>conditions you might be surprised and find they're still usable.
>>
>>I think that box is pretty much air tight, and they're all in sleeves, so
if
>>I had something that could still use them they might work.

There's a simple way to find out whether they are hard or soft sectored (if
looking at the label doesn't work):  Near the large hole in the center of
the disk, there should be a small round hole in the casing where you can see
the disk surface.  If you rotate the disk in the casing, you should see one
or more smaller holes in the disk surface.  If there is only one hole in the
entire cylinder around the disk, it is soft sectored.  If you see a hole
every 1/4-1/2 inch or so, then it is hard sectored.  The floppy drive reads
the holes when formatting the disk (and maybe at other times in the older
drives), and begins the sector or track there, depending on the hard or
softness.  I've used 8 inch disks on a Micom word processing computer when I
was little (maybe around 10 years ago).  I got it to do a lot of stuff no
one would have ever expected it to do, like drawing dot-matrix pictures by
setting the pitch and line spacing very small, so the letters would print
very close to each other.  Then I typed periods wherever I wanted it to
print a dot.  It took a long time, but it was kind of fun.

Just because old computers are outdated doesn't mean you can't use them
anymore.  A few days ago, I worked on a program in Turbo Pascal 5.5 on my
8088 computer with a VGA monitor.  Apparently, the monitor is getting old
and the picture on the screen got out of size.  Part of the text was covered
up by the bezel of the monitor and was therefore unreadable.  Since that
monitor does not have size controls, I wrote a little program which
reprograms the registers on the VGA card to decrease the size of the picture
and fit it on the screen.  It does actually work!

I think this thread is getting off-topic.  Maybe you'll see a post from me
in some electronics design newsgroup (if I can find anything like that)
sometime.

-Jerry Orlando
--------------------
I enjoy optimizing assembly language procedures so much that occasionally I
get carried away and forget about the rest of the program...
I also program in C++, Pascal, Visual Basic, and I know the old Basic, but
don't use it much anymore.