Date   : Thu, 26 Apr 2007 06:14:28 -0500
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Guess the disk set...

Charlie.Robson@... wrote:
>> and more importantly a PC capable of reading and writing FM data, which
> rules out the majority of them.
> 
> Careful now ;)

:-)

I went through another umm... 13 boards a couple of weeks ago testing for FM 
ability (5 motherboards with integrated FDCs and 8 I/O cards with FDCs on) - 
of that lot only three would write FM [1] successfully (and only one of those 
three [2] would handle sector sizes down to 128 bytes properly - not that that 
matters for just reading Acorn media)

[1] An ABit KT7A (VIA VT82C686B), one branded as "AI5TH-1.00" (SMC FDC37C6651R 
FDC), and an unknown IBM motherboard.

[2] The IBM. Sadly I don't know what system it came from, but it's circa 1996. 
P100 CPU, integrated peripherals including video [3]. BIOS product summary 
identifies as machine make/model "658659T", and System Board Identifier as 
"R1JYTBGGQLR".

[3] They were going to get pressed into service as networked flat-screen wall 
display controllers originally , so I'd luckily hoarded three of them.

Note: Mitsumi/Newtronics drives seem to be utter crap; they appear to have 
extra "smarts" on the drives for some unknown reason, and get themselves into 
a right state when asked to handle a FM data stream. Panasonic and TEAC drives 
seem fine so far.

cheers

Jules