This board is an accessory peripheral board for the Z8000 Modular Computer. I’m sounding like a broken record, but if you haven’t visited the blog page yet, please do read the overview and the videos on the Blog Page.
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The Floppy and CompactFlash storage board serves two purposes:
- An interface for floppy disk drives. It can read and write standard CP/M 2.2 disk images, and the BIOS comes configured to use it with a single 3.5″ 1.44MB floppy drive, which is the most common drive people will build into their Z8000 Modular Computer. Other drives are possible with a BIOS upgrade.
- An interface for a compactflash storage device. Compactflash looks a lot like IDE. This interface supports four “drives” on a single compactflash card, approximately 8MB each, giving you approximately 32 MB of storage. This is more storage than anyone could possibly ever need on this computer.
The two functions are independent. For most folks, I would suggest implementing the compactflash storage and not worrying about the floppy drive. Floppy media is hard to come by and due to the age it’s often not reliable. The drives themselves are likewise not reliable.
For compactflash, you’ll want to get older media. It’s recommended that you choose a 64 MB or 128 MB compactflash device on eBay.
Schematic
The schematic is pictured below.
As mentioned previously, the compactflash and floppy circuits are separable. You can build one or the other, or both!
Bill of Materials (BOM)
Yeah, right…