Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 5:57 pm
If you want to build a Telestrat, everything but the ULA is pretty much off the shelf and you could wirewrap one easy enough. I just have no interest in the project at all. The machine pretty much sits in computer collections at this point and if you write any software for it a handful of people will be able to run it. If you want a Telestrat, go buy/build one.
Adding a floppy interface to an ORIC is pointless. It's far more complex than an SD/MMC interface, you can't buy the original drives or disks anymore and even 3.5" drives are on their way out in favor of FLASH drives.
What I'm proposing is using a *SIMPLE* SD interface, a port to page memory including the overlay RAM and FLASH memory to hold the DOS.
*Possibly* a fixed speed serial port for hooking up to a PC and more paged RAM.
I'm talking very little circuitry here. Address decoding (simple AND OR NOT logic), an 8 bit latch for the page register and a VERY SMALL UART or two with a clock source. Everything else is just running wires to pins.
I even found a small 32K 5V flash device that could be used rather that a large expensive one.