SFD-700

A Floppy Disk Interface card for the Sharp MZ series of machines (MZ-80B/MZ-80A/MZ-700/MZ-800/MZ-1500/MZ-2000/MZ-2200).

This project is based on an iconic floppy disk interface card from the 1980's by the Aachen based company, Kersten & Partner GmbH. The company produced two cards, the SFD-700 for the Sharp MZ-700 and the SFD-800 for the Sharp MZ-800.

Owning an original SFD-800, I reproduced the SFD-800 from the original schematic and the design can be seen here: https://eaw.app/sfd800/. This card has been well tested and as the SFD-800 was quite a flexible design, it also worked in the MZ-80B/MZ-800/MZ-1500/MZ-2000/MZ-2200 computers. Unfortunately it didnt cater for the Sharp MZ-700 or indeed the Sharp MZ-80A.

To address the requirement of a floppy interface for the Sharp MZ-700 and MZ-80A, I considered reproducing the SFD-700 exactly but analysis showed it wouldnt work in an MZ-80A which uses a hardware trick to address the CPU speed shortcomings. I thus decided, based on the SFD-800 schematics, to create a version 2 of the SFD-700 design which would work in all the Sharp MZ series computers.

Please see my website (in due course), https://eaw.app for more documentation and any recent updates.