MFM Reader
owl writes:
https://www.5volts.ch/posts/mfmreader/
I still have some floppy drives laying around and I always planned to integrated them into my new SBC projects. In the 1990s I had once built a floppy disk controller for an Apple II and also built a SBC around a 65SC816 processor with a floppy disk controller using WD2797 FDC chips. Both worked quite will. FDCs are now obsolete and so I thought about emulating a FDC using a microcontroller. I also could have used new old stock controllers but that was not my intention.
In the internet you find several discussions about this topic and in many cases the conclusion was that it is not possible to read floppies without a controller. However there are also some projects describing a floppy disk emulator using a microcontroller with no or only little hardware support. Also there are several projects that read the raw MFM data and send it to a PC to decode the data. I was really tempted to give it a try.
My goal was to read and write HD floppies without any additional hardware and be able to read and write the content of individual sectors.
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