Hello everyone, I received my shiny 23 year old Cumana disk interface for the QL yesterday and am now trying to wire it up to a 'modern' 3.5" pc floppy drive... So far, the results have been mediocre at best. I have QDOS-formatted a DD floppy on the Q-emuLator but when I hook up the drive to the Cumana interface on the QL I can't read or format the floppy disk. The drive is obviously selected when I do a "dir flp2_" (or "dir flp3_" depending on whether I use untwisted or twisted slot on the cable) because the indicator light in the front panel goes on but I get a "not found" error when doing a "dir" and "format failed" when trying a "format".
I did a bit of research on the pinouts and it seems that the "standard shugart" interface is anything but standard, There seem to be quite a few variations of the signal assignments in the machines of the eighties. One interesting article by a fellow Finn is over here: http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/diskstepper.html On Dilwyn's site there is a Cumana manual which does not document the pinout on the i/f card and a "Generic disk interface manual" which does have a pinout diagram. The interesting bit in this diagram is pin 16 which is listed as "load head" whereas on the pc floppy drives pin 16 is used for "Motor on B". Even more interestingly, the generic pinout diagram does *not* have a "motor on" pin at all ! Does anyone know if the pinout in the generic document also applies for the Cumana interface and whether pin 16 really is "load head" on the QL? If this is indeed the case and there is no separate "motor on" signal on the QL interface then I guess I need to do a bit of wiring to enable "motor on" when I get a "drive select" signal. Best regards, Petri _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
