Hi, All, Some recent postings on one of the CBM groups on Facebook has turned my attention back to a bit of hardware I bought more than 30 years ago, a bare 2040/4040 mainboard. I've been looking over the schematics on zimmers.net in pub/cbm/schematics/drives/old/4040 and there's a scan glitch on one of the pin assignments for P2, the 20-pin connector that goes to the analog board. Here's the pinout as I've collected from the three digital board schematic sheets: P2 1 ? 2 HD SEL 1 3 -MTR0 4 WP0 5 ACT LED 0 6 WP1 7 -MTR1 8 ACT LED 1 9 S1B 10 ? 11 ? 12 ? 13 ? 14 DATA OUT 15 DATA IN 16 ? 17 S0A 18 S0B 19 S1A 20 ? and a loose tag at the lower left corner of 320806-3.gif ? READ INHIBIT The scan glitch is I can't clearly read what pin is READ INHIBIT. It could be pin 16 if the 1 is totally missing and the 6 has a void through it. The reason for going over this in detail is to figure out if it's feasible to cobble up a way to have the digital (main) board talk directly to an SA390/SA400 without the CBM analog board. This is something I tried to do long, long ago but it was beyond my skills when I was a teenager. I bought the bare digital board cheap and picked up a real SA400 and really should have just bought a CBM analog board (tossing off the Shugart analog board) but I think the local Commodore Dealer wanted way too much for it as a loose item, so I never got that drive connected up. I can always keep this digital board around as a spare for maintaining the 2040/4040 drives I already have but I'd kinda like to push this old project to completion. I think it's possible to hack the Shugart analog board on the SA400 to take the signals from P2 (stepper lines and motor controls and LED/switch lines) because I think it's a _real_ challenge to try to hack up a circuit to turn P2 into something resembling a Shugart 34-pin floppy interface. Not impossible, but probably more work than hacking the drive itself. I'm not concerned with trying to hack _two_ drives this way. One is enough and was my original goal back in the day anyway. Yes, I have a 2031 now and an upgraded 2040 (2040 badge with 4040 DOS v2 firmware) so this isn't about having _a_ drive on a PET, it's about getting an old project across the finish line for the sense of accomplishment. Anyone here do any low-level work on these drives? Any comments or suggestions? Thanks, -ethanReceived on 2020-05-29 21:58:27
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