Tony, An instrument slightly more to your taste than a PC might a 16500b logic analyser. Perhaps you've already got one. I believe these can work with both LIF and MSDOS floppies and uses an IDE HDD (which can painlessly be replaced with CF card) in DOS format internally. I don't know if it will handle other than 3.5" formats but it's quite possible that the support for those formats is generic and it might work, given an appropriately mangled hardware interface.
-adrian
