So, since I have an rPi in my //e anyway, and since it has plenty of spare GPIO pins, I thought maybe I'd try hooking some of them to a Disk II controller and writing a unix daemon to emulate a floppy drive. I'd think that the rPi would be fast enough to do it all in software, especially if it was running a realtime kernel...... But I dunno.....
Some conversion from 3.3v to 5v logic would be required of course. That got me thinking that it might just be easier to hook an MCP23017 (running at 5v) to the i2c pins through an i2c level converter, instead of messing around converting several GPIO pins to 5v. One would think that a 400kHz i2c bus would be sufficient to emulate a Disk II in software...... Maybe?
Anyone ever mess with anything remotely like this?
Probably not with Linux running - the timing is too tight. You'd need to develop something to replace the kernal entirely, like they did with the Pi1541.