Cartridge Dumper: Intercepting the FDC

[qjimbo]

Hey all!
I've got this really old megadrive/genesis rom dumper from 1994 called a "Double Pro Fighter", you can see all about it at my site here. Anyway the only data in and out of this device is through the parallel port adaptor and the floppy disc drive. Now this is the interesting thing, the floppy disc drive loads and saves data MUCH faster. Now I'm wondering whether it's possible to intercept the 8bit databus from the floppy and connect it to a computer and emulate a floppy drive or something. I have the datasheet for the floppy disc controller chip, and it's avaliable on the site, but I've never attempted anything like this before, I dunno if it's even possible. Anyone attempted anything like this before?
Thanks in advance guys, I know this is a bit technical but hey maybe you can help ^_^

EDIT: Found out some cool info at this vintage hardware forum: vintage-computer.com/vcforum/viewtopic.php?p=11060

Could still do with any other info though

[oompa loompa]

i don't think there's anything out there (hardware, or software) that will emulate the standard ibm floppy controller. you'll need to build an interface that will act as the floppy controller that has the same bus timings. the only sure way to make it work is to use an fpga. after getting the data and everything off the bus, i dunno how you're going to use this data =). you could send it to a pc or something and make some virtual floppy storage thinger.

what you're trying to do is really hard because there are no emulators for the floppy controller. you're going to have to build an interface yourself, and then build some software to interpret the data, which could be hard also depending on your level of programming skillz. the bios on the Pro Fighter is going to use a file allocation table, so you'll need to deal with that too.

if i were you, i would leave the Pro Fighter unit alone, and instead build my own Pro Fighter clone, or something that works just like it. if you can do that, you can insterface it with whatever you want, usb, ata, etc. The double pro fighter is a rare (well for me, i've never seen one in my nieghborhood =D), it'd be sad if it got destroyed

[qjimbo]

Thanks for your comments! But yes it's beginning to become clear this would be a challenging project, as for wrecking the DPF, yeah that would suck considering I paid £80 for it, but as far as I'm aware the chips used in it are still fairly widely avaliable so if I do manage to break it it won't be hard to fix (check out kaneda's site, he managed to totally replace everything in his friends DPF as far as I'm aware). Anyhoo my programming skills aren't too bad, I know delphi! Never really tried anything quite so low level before but hey I'm prepared to research into this

Anyhoo thanks for your suggestion about the FPGA, how would I go about writing for this device etc. ? Any tutorials ou can point me to? I think I'd rather go with that isntead of building an entirely new device since it seems silly to have a rom dumper here and let it go wasted

[oompa loompa]

i haven't seen many tutorials on fpga's on the net. most fpga development info is located on the websites of the companies that manufacture the devices, eg: lattice semiconductor, altera, atmel (i think mostly cpld), actel, etc.

the best way to start is to buy yourself an evaluation kit. there are a handful of programming languages for fpga's, the most popular one is vhdl

also, what's wrong with using the parallel port on the double fighter pro?