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/Vintage/Sinclair/82/Timex Peripherals/Timex Floppy Disk/ |
| k1.spdns.de / Vintage / Sinclair / 82 / Timex Peripherals / Timex Floppy Disk / |
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/Vintage/Sinclair/82/Timex Peripherals/Timex Floppy Disk/ |
| k1.spdns.de / Vintage / Sinclair / 82 / Timex Peripherals / Timex Floppy Disk / |
Sources say that the name is Timex FDD 3, similar to Amstrad's naming of their floppy disk drive, but i have my doubts about this. I had only one chance up to now to see these units and there they were unlabeled except for the disk drives, which were labeled "Timex Sinclair 1000", obviously taken from a TS1000 computer, "English Micro Connection / DISK DRIVE", which looks slightly hand-made and "TIMEX FLOPPY DISK" which looks original and sounds reasonable. See the pictures below.
Original author: Wojtek Wasilewski, Poland
This is an external floppy disk drive which can work with both TIMEX and genuine ZX Spectrum. FDD 3 consists of three plastic boxes : 3" floppy drive, so called controller and power supply. The controller is actually a standalone 4 MHz Z80 based computer. It communicates with the TS2068 or ZX Spectrum via an interface connected to the edge connector. Inside this interface there is a 4 kB EPROM, a static RAM (? 2kB) and a couple of TTL's. During operation ROM and RAM from the interface are paged with the Spectrum ROM. No Spectrum RAM is used for new system variables.
On each floppy disk there is a copy of TOS (Timex Operating System, 16kB) which is loaded to memory of the controller during it's boot.
The structure of the filesystem includes subdirectories, and in the root directory there are two special files: CH_A.SCP and CH_B.SCP which actually refer to the RS232 ports built into controller. They can be handled as files - i can see here analogy to UNIX /dev/tty directory entries.
3" disks are nowadays almost impossible to obtain. Fortunately the physical interface (the connector) of 3" floppy drives is almost the same as for 360 kB 5.25" discs. I was able to replace a 3" drive with a 5.25" one to use more standard disks. The one inconvenience is that to access the other side of 3" discs it is enough to put the disk upside down into drive, while this cannot be done with 5.25" disk. (well, I know method to do so with C64 disks, but it will not work). I got access to other side of disk using a small switch which controls the state of the side_select line of the floppy drive manually.
It is possible to connect up to 4 disk drives to one FDD3 controller. As far as I know format of TIMEX 3" disks is different from format of 3" disks used by Amstrad +3. There are also other versions of TIMEX computer and floppy disk drives.
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Current Selling Prices/ | 2019-08-20 05:25 | 5 | ||
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XL/ | 2019-08-20 05:25 | 15 | ||
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Adapter rear view.jpg size: 600 × 450 |
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Adapter.jpg size: 600 × 450 |
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Controller in Styrofoam.jpg size: 600 × 450 |
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Controller, open.jpg size: 400 × 311 |
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Controller.jpg size: 600 × 450 |
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DD Box.jpg size: 600 × 450 |
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Exporting programs for emulators.txt | 2006-07-17 18:09 | 2188 | ||
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PS, front view.jpg size: 600 × 450 |
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