Oric Blake's 7 and ENCOUNTER game load issues on Jasmin Disk Controller (FTDOS) and Preservation Questions

[iss]

Congrats @mininaller! This is amazing! All credits are for you .

Actually I was just thinking for something like the shielded IDE HDD cables.
They have 40 pins but in fact they are 80 wires with alternating signal,ground,signal,ground,...

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I think this will give better results. Unfortunately I don't have such 34-pin connectors with shields.
Will try find, hopefully they exist .

I thought the Jasmin had a 1773... this is surprising. Anybody knows what are the differences between the two chips? I bet some timings, but anything else?

It's 1770 for sure! I don't know what's exactly different and will RTFM ( Attached ) very careful.
btw, here is Atari discussion 'wd1772 vs. wd1770 vs. wd1773'. And the 2 first comments:

- "You can not replace 1772 in ST by 1770. This is tested."
- "In essence the 1770 and 1772 are fully pin-compatible, with the difference being the 1772 has faster step rates. The 1773 has the same step rates as the 1770 (and the 1793) but has a ready/enable precomp input versus the motor on output of the 1770 and 1772. The 1770 should be a drop-in replacement, but with slower step rates."

[iss]

@Chema and @mininaller: any news?

For the protocol: @Chema sent me testing Blake's-7 image with updated load functions. The new code seams to work and the games loads but even with short cable random errors occur which makes my tests very unreliable as basis for decision that the issues are fixed.

Because I'm taking "Jasmin" very very personal, last days I've made something ( hopefully not stupid ) and I am looking forward to see if there will be improvements. It's 2-parts adapter for 40-pin/80-wires IDE cable:

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The PCB are produced and already shipped. Let's see what will happen this time....

[Chema]

I have been recovering from a cold and some unusual stress at work. Gimme a couple of days and I will try to clean the code to share.

The good thing is we now have a code that works on the real Jasmin, albeit with problems due to noise. It would be interesting to check how TDos works at all!

I would like to test the correct timings needed, but that will take quite some time due to trial and error...

Did you try to put aluminum foil and see if it also solves the problems in your case?

[Dbug]

On the topic of cables, but not Jasmin related, yesterday I found out that one of my cables between the Greaseweazle and the 3" drive was not 100% properly crimped, and that resulted in random errors on some tracks between 20 and 36. By keeping pressure on the cable the errors vanished, and replacing the cable fixed the problem.

I was really not expecting this type of error due to a cable, generally it was a all or nothing, not just "mostly works until it does not anymore". That's scary!