I finally got round to building the HxC floppy emulator and i thought i'd share some of my observations.
The Parts.
Prety easy to find, as stated they can be sourced from Farnell or whatever local supplier you use. The EPM7128 is being phased out with it being an older style 5V part but is still available at a cost. I had a spare one left over from a previous N64 cart emulator project so i was lucky.
There is no clear indication as to what type of ferrite to use on the usb power supply. I chanced it for now and just bridged it out .. hope the nasty EMI doesn't catch me out
The PCB.
A great layout that i think most hobbyists can easily handle. The SSOP FTDI chip will probably make some people think twice but with a bit of patience and the right tools it isn't too hard.
The only minor thing is that one of the JTAG pins isnt brought out to a test pad. Like i said its very minor and would be of no conciquence if your programming the CPLD in a seperate programmer.
Building it.
Other than the afforementioned USB SMD it shouldn't be a problem. My board didn't work initially because i had managed to short some of the SRAM pins to the tracks that were running between them, a concequence of using homebrew boards without soldermask
Top , Nice view
Bottom , Not so nice view
The Software.
Ok it looks a little bit clunky but what more do you need ? Ive only been able to test it with the 2 Amigas i have available but it seems to work fine.
I did have a slight problem with certain .DMS files crashing the software thought, maybe Jeff would like to take a look at them to see if its a fixable bug ?
Conclusion ?
A very , very nice piece of kit. Thanks for sharing this with us
MrSporty
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