Schweet... that's pretty damn impressive, and I'm a hardware geek (
been involved in hi-tech since ~ '84)...
I'd personally recommend losing that archaic floppy drive for an emulator (ie. GoTek) and you'd pretty much remove any legacy tech sludge from the hardware BOM. It's considerably more reliable on an order of magnitude. I actually extracted the bootable images of all the install media for both pieces of gear (
D8B & HDR) onto a usb stick... last time was during upgrades to install the 5.1 operating system community version (
cracked), and reinstall my HDR (
v1.40 b420).... both when I upgraded to compact flash card bootable media. At this point, it's safe to say you'll use it only once... and then put the usb stick into safe storage (
just in the event)...
http://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=60Add it as a task for a Phase 1.1 upgrade endeavor or something... that way you won't forget about it, and you can put it off til later when time permits and it's more feasible. It literally drops right in, under 5 minutes time... just a suggestion...
Again RJH_MUSIC, really impressive fabrication, wiring and internal chassis work. You're blazing a trail here, I could see meselfs embarking on such a thing at some point. I'm definitely gonna be lurking around and watching this thread...