Does floppy disk controller make sense?
Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 12:10 pm
Does floppy disk controller on our rainbow-mixed x86 machines makes sense in it's design or interfaces?
The problem is, i can't seem to find one.
First, i've tried times and again to make a floppy driver on the OS side, in various modes and various ways. Some of them worked, few did so on real hardware.
Then, seeking understanding (and wishing to make that next thing at least remotely usable), i've been making the said FDC in my 8086 emulator.
No luck again. The circa-1987 BIOS i dug up for it didn't seem to understand the hardware i present it, expecting different result sizes and waiting for an irq where there shouldn't be one.
Thus, out of ideas, i look at what others have done.
Bochs, the nice thingy that amazed me a decade ago, appears to have a completely perpendicular code to what i was making, only seemingly working thru DMA (another WTF piece of x86 hardware), with intersections only around the core functions.
Qemu, the ingenious translator-emulator, is written in such a cryptic way i couldn't find heads or tails of it's floppy controller, only the middle. And, again, it looks perpendicular to both Bochs and me, without a trace of the commands that aged BIOS trying to send it.
So, does this piece of ancient hardware makes any sense and where can i get some?
The problem is, i can't seem to find one.
First, i've tried times and again to make a floppy driver on the OS side, in various modes and various ways. Some of them worked, few did so on real hardware.
Then, seeking understanding (and wishing to make that next thing at least remotely usable), i've been making the said FDC in my 8086 emulator.
No luck again. The circa-1987 BIOS i dug up for it didn't seem to understand the hardware i present it, expecting different result sizes and waiting for an irq where there shouldn't be one.
Thus, out of ideas, i look at what others have done.
Bochs, the nice thingy that amazed me a decade ago, appears to have a completely perpendicular code to what i was making, only seemingly working thru DMA (another WTF piece of x86 hardware), with intersections only around the core functions.
Qemu, the ingenious translator-emulator, is written in such a cryptic way i couldn't find heads or tails of it's floppy controller, only the middle. And, again, it looks perpendicular to both Bochs and me, without a trace of the commands that aged BIOS trying to send it.
So, does this piece of ancient hardware makes any sense and where can i get some?