What is the $600 Dollar? I've never had that much costs on my boards to clone... And my designs are free on GitHub including gerber files. But I agree, there is no use of cloning a common board.
To be honest, the most FDC controllers I see on Ebay seem to be the ones where it is impossible to find software for. Or any hardware documentation.
Regards, Roland
It is very expensive for me doing this in AU. I do not have any pcb software. So I draw the images as jpg's. My PCB maker uses Altium and he regenerates them as pcb files costing more money & his time. But one advantage, I get an exact track artwork match to the original. People who have regenerated the Apple 1 pcb, did not get an exact match to the original. So the replica boards I get made are perfect replicas in every respect, except sometimes I use gold on all the fingers & pads to increase the quality and again it adds up the dollar cost. So I'm a fanatic for the quality of the replica and it adds another layer of cost. Usually, every board I have done works first time with zero revisions.
The N* DSDD controller board I suggested, the hardware manual is online and copies of it appear on the bay from time to time. Also it requires zero software to run it ! (except the usual CP/M operating system, I have CP/M 2.2 48k on my SOL-20. There is also the Northstar DOS, which Mike Douglas has)
All it requires is already built into the firmware of its three OTP PROMS. This is why I love it and recommended it to you. It is "Plug & Play". And, combined with Mike Douglas's virtual sector generator board, it works seamlessly with hard or soft sectored media, with the proviso that the actual 5.25" disk drives you have support hard sectored disks. The ones I use (the YE DATA YD-580) are designed to inhibit the use of hard sectored disks, they are detected by its chipset and the drive disabled, but it doesn't bother me because I do everything on soft sectored disks.(The YE DATA drives are very beautifully made direct drive types though, with minimal speed jitter, super high quality Japanese components & engineering, quite the work of art).
This article shows pictures of these drives built into a Japanese made extruded aluminium enclosure, which also houses Mike's VSG:
https://www.worldphaco.com/uploads/EXTERNAL_DUAL_5.pdf
A tip on soft sectored disks: the later manufactured disks, especially the 3M type DSDD,RH, where the box shows the 1988 world Olympic 5 ring logo appear to have super quality magnetic media and the absence of any read-write issues. I bought a lot of other 5.25" brands, some were hopeless, presumably age degraded.
Floppy chip doesn't matter; the data rate and the time required to service it on a 2 MHz 8080A does. The 2793 is pretty much a 1793 with some functions incorporated. In terms of being "advanced', the NEC µPD765 is more so. (witness the Compupro Disk-1 floppy controller).
