I'd pay money to see you smash it with a crowbar.
FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
51–60 of 66 posts
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#52Don't copy that floppy
With its very own horrible rap video with Flight Simulator in the background.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#53I would love to see this on an LGR Oddware episode...
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#54The "oh look, this disk drive is actually a whole PC" aspect reminds me of the "Mr. Backup Z64" copier for Nintendo 64. It had a 386-class embedded PC running a ROM-based DOS system to operate the internal Zip drive. Since the Zip drive sat on a standard ATA interface being driven by DOS, it could be replaced with a hard drive or CompactFlash slot. More loosely, it's also reminiscent of the Commodore disk drives that…
Huh. I had no idea that existed! I was never clear on how people extracted ROM images from N64 cartridges, but that is pretty clever.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#55I'd pay money to see you smash it with a crowbar.
What would that achieve?
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's https://file.pizza which uses WebRTC for an easy to use peer-to-peer transfer service.
I love file.pizza (and its friends) but they're not great for large files. It has to buffer the whole thing in memory.
Is this a project limitation or a tech limitation? I am familiar w/ browser efforts to impl web streams, I wonder if that would help.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you could just email stuff
yes, but: - use LTE instead of line - encrypt the hell out of it - just create pairs only -> just got the most secure 2 peer communication device. Probably you can fit it on a usb stick with a slot for a SIM. Actually not a bad idea for a startup. Who's in? :)
Here's who you reach out to for that, a startup working with Marvell doing a pre-standard 5G ISP service: https://starry.com
I'm not affiliated with them, I just think it's a good match.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh, hello! I've been looking for a DiskFax machine for a long while, in fact I think it was my searches for that that ended up finding this one (on ebay). That was a few years before the FISK, right? (FISK was ~1993). What was it internally? Something like a 6502/Z80 ?
8088 internally with a custom ASIC for the board support (no DMA). I think it launched in 1990. Memory was 128K of Intel flash with 8K fixed boot partition and 64K of RAM. Z8530 for the UART, Rockwell chipset for the fax portion. I seem to remember lots of messing around getting the parameters correct for the filters to detect dial tone for various european telco approvals. There was also a pass through port to allow…
Very neat! That sounds like it's pretty similar to this one then. I wonder if the FISK was directly inspired by the DiskFax? I'm hoping to get in touch with the designer so I may have some answers soon.
I'd love to see those schematics if you can find them!
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#59The "oh look, this disk drive is actually a whole PC" aspect reminds me of the "Mr. Backup Z64" copier for Nintendo 64. It had a 386-class embedded PC running a ROM-based DOS system to operate the internal Zip drive. Since the Zip drive sat on a standard ATA interface being driven by DOS, it could be replaced with a hard drive or CompactFlash slot. More loosely, it's also reminiscent of the Commodore disk drives that…
"This disk drive is actually a whole PC" was basically Nintendo's entire Unique Selling Proposition for a long while. Nintendo made consoles cheaply enough to make a profit, because they weren't designed to be powerful enough for the games that would be released at the end of the console's lifecycle, only the games that would be released near the beginning. But they managed to release games as if the console was more…
>There is a Nintendo DS flash cart that embeds a full GBA-compatible CPU core
I can't find that much information but you're either talking about the Supercard or the CycloDS - both look like they were running emulators. Almost makes me want to find out if it's possible to put an ESP8266 in a cart.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fun bit of related trivia is that the 6502 in the Commodore 1541 disk drive is slightly faster than the 6510 in the PAL C64.
The 1541 had a whole 6502 embedded system in it??? TIL. Yet it was so astonishingly slow, it was a laughing stock among junior high school kids. Total garbage compared to the Apple II drives designed by Woz, which were just dumb hardware, combined with a logic state sequencer" on the circuit card and registers for step motor control.
The drive itself was actually very powerful and capable, it just was very limited by having to talk to the C64 using the Vic20-compatible interface, which had issues.
That's why there were so many products for the c64 to fix it: Epyx Fast Load cartridges, for example. And plenty of games worked by having you first load a very simple file that just installed faster disk IO code and then used that code to load the rest of the game.
That's basically what Disk II drives did on the Apple II, just for EVERY (bootable) DISK instead of only some of them: The first bootloader is encoded in a simplified method so that they can save firmware space, but the first bootloader is just better disk IO routines to load the rest of the disk.