fluxengine
fluxengine copied to clipboard
davidgiven
Greaseweazle missing features
Fluxengine's Greaseweazle documentation states that most features are available when using Greaseweazle hardware. Is there anything lacking in Greaseweazle firmware that would unblock missing features? Or would effort be better directed at fluxengine's Greaseweazle driver?
And a minor documentation nit: Greaseweazle, not GreaseWeazle.
AFAIK the only major missing feature is hard sector support. I don't have any hard sectored disks and so am unable to test this; FluxEngine's own firmware for this was contributed (replacing my own broken attempt to implement it!).
Re 'GreaseWeazle': muscle memory, I'm afraid. I thought I'd fixed most of these...
Ah okay. I have no hard sectored disks or drives either. Can fluxengine write such disks, or is it read only? If someone sufficiently interested and with the hardware and a greaseweazle comes along, I'm sure we could get HS working on the weazle.
The spelling was on the greaseweazle docs page. That's the only place I noticed it.
EDIT: I looked up the fluxengine HS support. I see read and write is handled. Nice!
It can read and write them (see the Northstar: https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/disk-northstar.html). However, write support is done the brute force way by inserting padding bits until we know the next sector is due. There used to be support for a bitstream opcode that made the writer pause until the next sector pulse but it never worked and so it got taken out. All that's left is firmware logic for identifying the true index pulse from the sector pulses. I'd like to fix this, but I'd need some hard-sectored disks and also a hard-sectored system for testing with.
Yes I agree sync'ing with the sector marks on writes would be great. Oh well. There's so little HS media out there.
Not exactly a feature but more a bug, I still experience https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine/issues/512 frequently, I think fluxengine is missing an initialization or resync on connect, but I haven't gone and looked at the details of it yet myself.
