Date   : Wed, 12 Oct 2005 19:00:19 +0100
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Programming the 8271 and 1770 FDC's from BASIC

Out of interest, how easy is this?

I'm idly thinking that having a BBC hooked up to the PC via a serial 
link and running some sort of "Son of Xfer" software would be handy in 
making/restoring disk images for some of the other non-Acorn hardware 
that I use. The BBC's probably got the best BASIC in a machine of that 
timeframe.

Obviously I need it to work with oddball sectors per track - tracks I 
expect will always be 40 or 80, unless I hook up an 8" drive to the 
beeb, at which point 77 might be useful too.

I *think* xfer makes use of fairly high-level ROM routines to read/write 
  at the track level though (not studied the code yet), whereas I'd need 
to presumably talk to the disk controller chip direct.

Anyone out there have any useful notes or pointers to info? May well be 
a non-viable project for all sorts of reasons, but it was just an idle 
thought this morning...

cheers

Jules