Dragon uses a Commodore floppy drive

[JeeK]

Several weeks ago we discussed on the Coco mailing list the possibility to use a Commodore VC1541 or similar on a Coco ... That reminds me on my project back into 1987, which I have dug out for the reason to make it accessible to the public ("as is"): http://klasek.at/hc/dragon/iec-floppy/.
Maybe someone is still interested in such a solution or even enhancements ...
Otherwise, just have fun with this kind of curiosity ...

Johann

[Rink]

Looks pretty cool. Might have to give that a try one day.

Cheers.

[robcfg]

Hallo Johann, and welcome to the archive!

This is a very interesting project, and indeed a nice solution as Dragon disk drives were hard to find.

I was wondering if the Cbm floppy drive could be used from a Dragon 64, by attaching the drive to the serial port...

[JeeK]

Hallo Johann, and welcome to the archive!

This is a very interesting project, and indeed a nice solution as Dragon disk drives were hard to find.

I was wondering if the Cbm floppy drive could be used from a Dragon 64, by attaching the drive to the serial port...

Thanks for the welcome, I'm wondering myself that I overlooked this site until now ...

Back to Dragon 64: IMHO, RS232 Serial Port (or any shift register from a CIA or VIA) is not compatible
to the serial IEC bus. I think it's nearly impossible to program or even abuse an ACIA that way, it could produce
an IEC bus conforming signaling. It's more oriented to a bus protocol than to common point-to-point based communication.
With a data line which is synchronized to a clock line and a ATN (attention) line to make bus requests, it has
nothing common with classic RS232 lines. I could not imagine how to tweak an ACIA to get TxD/RxD/RTS/CTS/DTR/DCD
to do the IEC protocol anyhow ...

Johann