As you may (should :P) know, a Floppy Drive Emulator has been designed by Jean-Francois Del Nero. See http://torlus.com/floppy/ for more information.

His interface uses programmable logic (CPLD or FPGA) to deliver a perfect timing and emulation of a floppy drive. However, various projects exist, based on microcontrollers.
So I wanted to give it a try myself, using a microcontroller. I chose a LPC2106 mounted on a convenient DIP board (LPC-H2106 from Olimex), and started to work on it last week.

Unlike the current CLPD-based version from Jeff, it uses SD cards for storage, as in his WIP FPGA-based standalone version. With great help of Jeff, I eventually managed to get some good results, as you can see on these pictures :

HTDFE

HTDFE2

Thanks again Jeff for your time and patience ;)

As you're probably aware of, MCU are easier to use, and cheaper than programmable logic. However, they bring some limitations, and in such a project where timing is critical, there are some features (especially floppy write support), that are probably not possible with a MCU "alone". However, this work could be a good start to study solutions that could mix external (programmable) logic and MCUs, in order to keep the cost as low as possible, and make it easy to assemble by hand.
Stay tuned !