Developed logic for seeks and data separation during write to emulated disk drive

ALTO DISK TOOL

Today I built the logic to handle seeks when the Alto system requests it of the disk emulator. It is essentially ready for testing. It should be accurate in timing, appearing to take the same time as a physical Diablo drive.

I set up the input and output signals to be sensitive to the Select Unit 1 signal and also refuse to respond if the virtual cartridge is not loaded. In addition, the ReadData and ReadClock outputs are gated by ReadGate.

A key component needed to handle writing to the emulated disk is a data separator. The computer sends 100 ns width pulses, with the timing between pulses determining whether it is sending a 0 or a 1 bit. That is, a zero bit value is transmitted by delivering a100ns pulse followed by 500ns of delay before the next 'clock' pulse. A one bit value is transmitted by sending the 100ns clock pulse, a delay of 200ns, a 100 ns data pulse, and a final delay of 200ns before the next clock pulse.

I receive bottom stream of pulses, must break out clock and data as above

The data separator sees the continual train of pulses every 600 ns as the clock pulses. It watches in the interval between clock pulses to see if a second pulse is transmitted midway between - that represents a 1 bit value. I built the logic to accomplish this and to drive my deserializer which shifts the incoming bit values into words which will be stored in RAM as the record is written.

Next up is the process that will continually read the sectors rotating under the virtual head, whether the results are transmitted to the CPU or not. This is the central process that will underlie the entire disk emulation. I spent the day building this in more detail, drawing Moore and Mealy diagrams until I felt it was ready but hadn't yet begun to code in VHDL,