On Sun, Jun 25, 2023 at 8:31 AM r.stricklin via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Jun 24, 2023, at 11:10 PM, Tony Duell via cctalk <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > > > And this is where I get lost.. > > > > I do not understand your overbearing attitude of helplessness toward this > project. I have known you on many occasions to go to far greater lengths to > achieve far deeper understanding of far more complicated devices. Far less > intelligent people than you have managed somehow to marshal the necessary > resources to make useful headway with the damn thing. The majority of the > questions you’re demanding answers to seem to me like the kind of questions > that could be easily answered with about four minutes’ worth of simple > experimentation.
It's a combination of things : I regard the Greaseweazle (or any other similar device) as a tool to help me to do something which I enjoy -- running classic computers. While I am happy to spend time improving my skills at using tools, I do not expect to have to guess at what the designer was doing. I also want to understand what my tools should be doing. Not what they seem to have done in the past. Getting some of my classics running is a big enough ob without having to worry whether or not some missing option in writing the boot disk image to a real disk has caused that disk to be mangled. The more I know to be correct, the better. I can sit down with the Greaseweazle board, the PC, a floppy drive and a logic analyser and probably find some combination of options that produces what look to be sensible signals on the Write Data line. But whether they are sensible signals is a much bigger problem. Yes, I like solving puzzles. But this shouldn't be a puzzle. If I want to solve a puzzle about reading and writing arbitrary disk formats the I'll design my own device to do it. -tony
