Never heard of this one before, and it didn't seem to be mentioned on VOGONS.
DREM (DRive EMulator) - MFM/RLL Drive Emulator
https://www.drem.info/
Emulates MRM/RLL hard drives and floppy disk drives.
Perhaps it's a knock off of some other product?
"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen
Stiletto
Looks great ! From the user manual it does support many well known MFM/RLL controllers which is a plus !
The current price is a bit high but considering never having to replace the antique mechanical HD it could be well worth it.
Maybe if I get a bonus this year will look into one, I swapped a '89 SCSI adapter and '90 SCSI HD into my XT3 because I really do not like old MFM/RLL drives.
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
Nice find! I can see that coming in handy in an industrial and manufacturing setting and just fun to play with for our hobby
Like floppy interface, MFM/RLL interface was hybrid digital and analog using digital signals to control by selecting one of drive(s), for seeking, and for heads selecting with few status signals. For analog signal through 20 pin connector, one signal, and heavily grounded pins and using four contacts, which is two contacts of differential read, and another two contacts differential write and isolated between ground pins.
In other words, like GOTEK floppy emulator, this is trivial to emulate. Just the need to have very high speed D/A and A/D to capture the analog high speed data.
And the MFM/RLL used very well known format signaling that is based on rules to arrange one and zeros reduced to few groups of 1 and 0, not proprietary.
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
They forgot ESDI interface. Then it would be an universal old hard drive emulator.
I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.
Looking very nice but price is much too high to play with it...
Also to mention this idea is not new:
https://www.pdp8.net/mfm/mfm.shtml
https://github.com/dgesswein/mfm
"This page has information on the MFM hard disk reader and emulator I have been working on. The unit is intended to read MFM hard drives for archiving and to emulate one or two MFM hard drives to replace failing MFM drives. The image read from a real hard drive can be used for the emulation."
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! 😀
I'm just a bit surprised that they use SD cards.
These are cheap consumer's products that in practice have no quality control. Just like no- name USB pen drives
.
Also, SD cards are the primary victims for fake/counterfeit cards that report false capacity.
IMHO, the "correct" media type would be CompactFlash (Industrial type), CFast, MMC etc.
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