Hi, Do you have the schematics of the pcb that is in the 1565 drive? Are you planning to make replica boards? Steve From: Michał Pleban <lists@michau.name> To: "cbm-hackers@musoftware.de" <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de> Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2016 10:16 AM Subject: Commodore 65 and DIN8 cable Hello! I started a project to re-create the 1565 external floppy for the Commodore 65. The floppy is supposed to be attached to the computer via a mini-DIN8 cable. So I purchased a cable and stuck it into the floppy port of the computer (of course I had to solder a mini-DIN8 connector there first). The internal floppy stopped working. When I remove the cable, the floppy works again. Hmm. I suspect that this happens because the "disk read data" and "disk write data" signals are exposed directly on the floppy port, and they are shared among all floppies. So it looks to me that some stray signals are being induced on these lines in the cable, and they confuse the disk controller enough to throw disk read errors. This would be similar to Bil's story about the data bus of C116 being exposed directly on the joystick port. To confirm this, I bought a shorter cable. The original cable had 3m, and the new one has 1m. The situation improved somewhat - now the floppy works about 20% of the time. With a yet shorter cable I could probably make it work even better, but that's the shortest cable I found on Ebay, and besides it's not really a solution I'm looking for. My extremely limited knowledge of analog electronics tells me that perhaps I need termination on the end of cable. Is this a good guess? And if yes, is there any way to find the correct terminating resistor value apart from soldering a potentiometer between GND and DISK_RD and patiently trying for the best value? Also, at some point of course a floppy drive will be attached to the end of cable - what should happen with the termination then? I suppose it should be removed but will the floppy drive itself act as a good terminator? And why this effect does not exhibit itself in PCs and other computers where the floppy cables also tend to be long (or maybe it does)? Regards, Michau. Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2016-01-28 21:00:10
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