[Coco] MCC-216

[Allen Huffman]

On Jan 2, 2013, at 4:26 PM, Frank Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:
> need to copy. In your case you might want to scour thrift stores and find and old 486 box with a real 5/25" floppy and try to find a 360K drive to stick in it. There are free DOS versions now, or you could run Linux and do some customizing to create virtual images of the disks

A slightly less obsolete piece of bulky hardware ;-)

A good starting point would simply be a CoCo I/O bus that hooks to a Mac/PC with all the ports. That would certainly go a long way towards emulation feeling like using a CoCo.

> The MCC-216 relies on floppy emulation and uses the SD card as the only storage medium. I don't know if the USB port can be used as a communication port or not. I would assume it could be, would just need the proper support in the FPGA core. The main function of the

The problem as I understand it with USB is that it's more done in the controller to get sectors. Do they even work with old PC copy protection disks? I know disk utilities that do low level stuff do not (or did not, years ago) work with USB drives. I have a $11 3.5" USB drive and I have wondered if I could open it and convert a cable to make it go to a 5 1/4" drive. Cheap enough experiment.

> A good review of the MCC-216 is located at http://www.commodorefree.com/vol4.htm. You want issue 46. Only the PDF file has pictures.

I will have to check that out. I'd never heard of it before, but I like the concept.

		-- A