doublebuffer wrote on 2023-07-02, 13:50:

jtchip wrote on 2023-06-29, 01:04:

I stumbled across this discussion on a fork of FlashFloppy that interfaces a Gotek (the original 72MHz Cortex-M4)

Interesting, I do have Gotek but I'm unsure what MC it has, it's something like four years old so I have to explore that possibility. Thanks for the heads up!

I second that. It's interesting, indeed.
There are parallels between floppy drives and early MFM fixed-disks.

Main difference is the bandwidth, I suppose.
A PC floppy drive interface has a transfer rate of 250 to 500 Kbit per second..

By contrast an early 5 Megabyte MFM fixed-disk does transfer 10 MBit per second (carrys about 5MBit/s of actual usable information) over the ST506/412 interface.
That's about the speed of a 10Base2 ethernet card.

The actual transfer rate, digitally, was about 800 Kilobyte per second. On an MFM drive running at 3600 RPM.

Anyway, maybe the interleave factor can help to make things easier to the emulator. As a last resort, so to say.
If the interleave factor is very bad, the Gotek might be able to keep track (pun intended):

If the interleave is poor, it needs an extra cycle (another revolution of the disk) to get to the next sector/track/cylinder etc.

That's what was essentially done to make MFM drives work in very slow PCs with an 8088 CPU.
Albeit for the other side of the MFM/RLL controller (PC side rather than HDD side).

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-07-02, 13:50:

Interesting, I do have Gotek but I'm unsure what MC it has, it's something like four years old so I have to explore that possibility. Thanks for the heads up!

Almost certainly the original 72MHz STM32F105, that's what my 3-year old one has and the wiki says that was used until early 2021.
I wouldn't go building the adapter just yet, at least not before discussing it with the developer. It does appear that he may be the only one to have used it and it wasn't with a PC either.

Speed is not the issue, 10Mbit is just 10MHz, trivial. Its just tedious implementation of the formatting and niche target audience that makes this not that interesting, especially considering there already is one working implementation using beaglebone https://www.pdp8online.com/mfm/code/emu/ Reimplementing using $10 pico is possible, but why? to save $40 vs BeagleBone Black?

"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself." - A. H. Weller