Forty Years of Personal Computing - V2 Floppy Disk Controller

WD2797 controller card for 8" Pertec drives in
the Icom Peripherals FD360

The FD1771 disk controller works well with the Pertec 8" drives. The single-density drives each hold around 300 KB of data. 

Single-density encoding is FM, which has regular clock pulses, with a data pulse placed between. A data pulse indicates a "1", a missing pulse is a "0".

Double-density uses Modified FM (MFM) encoding. It eliminates the clock pulses entirely, leaving only the data pulses. To keep synchronization during runs of zeros, extra pulses are inserted between each pair of zeros. Encoded in this way, the clock can be recovered from the data pulses alone.

Western Digital followed the FD1771 with the WD179x chips, which support double-density with a two device solution. The later WD279x chips offer the same features on a single device. Double-density allows 500 KB on the same disks, with the data transfer rate also doubled.

WD2797 8" Controller

Back side of the 8" controller

September 1986, I built a new controller using the WD2797 to support the Pertec FD400 drives. While the drives were designed for single-density, I hoped they would work using double-density.

In keeping with my other home brew cards, it's built on a piece of 0.1" perfboard with the Molex connectors epoxied to the bottom edge. Wire wrap sockets are used.

Naturally, I broke out the WWARP program I used years before to build the MC6809E V1 card. 

The WD2797 design borrows from the FD1771 design. I kept the latching data bus buffer, but eliminated the redundant data bus buffers in front of them. The WD2797 performs the clock/data separation, which eliminates several gates. Fourteen total chips on this board, whereas the FD1771 board used more like eighteen. 

Double-density is enabled through an option jumper. The SWTPc DC-4 controller used the SSO output to drive the DDEN* pin through an inverter. (SWTPc offered double-density before double-sided disks) One side effect of using SSO is the sector address markers will have side 0 for single-density sectors and side 1 for double density sectors.

Other designs used bit 7 of the drive select latch, controlled through software. SSO isn't connected to anything, as the Pertec drives only have one side.

A jumper at the top of the card chooses the DDEN* signal source: the SSO pin, or bit 7 of the drive select latch. Both paths go through an inverter, so double-density is selected with a 1 on either the SSO pin or bit 7. 

Bit 3 of the drive select latch controls ENP - the pin for write pre-compensation. Generally, ENP would connect to the TG43 output of the floppy drive interface. Using a separate bit allows write pre-compensation to be enabled or disabled at any time, through software. I didn't know if write pre-compensation would be required or desired. It seemed like a good plan to allow write pre-compensation on any track, since the Pertec drives weren't designed for double-density.

Reading the drive select latch address returns the state of the INTRQ* and DRQ* pins, on bits 7 and 6, respectively. Using these separate bits allows more efficient loops than reading and interpreting the status bits of the WD2797. The SWTPc DC-4 introduced this feature, and is common to controllers of that era.

The WD2797 calibration starts by grounding the TEST* pin and checking three signals with a scope.  A set of four pins at the base of the WD2797 chip bring these signals out making calibration easier. 

To support the new controller, I re-wrote the Flex09 disk drivers to allow double-density operation. 

Do the Pertec drives work at double-density? I don't know. Supporting double-density meant re-writing NEWDISK to initialize in double-density format. Before I figured that out, my interest shifted from Flex09 to OS-9, and I did not complete that project. But the card works great with single-density.