Talk:FeaturePak
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Why did they enhance isolation for 34 pins? Is that for wiring out Shugart bus?
[edit]34 pins of the card have “enhanced isolation”. I guess it's just doubling the pitch (as seen in the picture) or interleaving them with ground. This sounds almost like if they tried to allow using floppy disk drive interface (TL;DR: 5 V open-collector, interleaved with ground on the ribbon cable just like 80-pin ATA, but having the grounds explicitly wired on the IDC connector, totaling at 34 pins: some of them are unused or subject to vendor-specific variations, as it's just a de facto standard emergent from old Shugart 50ish-pin interfaces). It has the same pin count and it did make approximately equivalent design decisions regarding signal integrity. I wouldn't be surprised even by the fact it has (nearly?) the same pitch (after merging both sides of the edge connector) so it's super easy to wire it on a PCB to the quasi-standard floppy connector/pin header. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but after diving in the floppy disk stuff, I can't overlook the similarity. It might be interesting to add more information on this pitch-doubling feature of the FeaturePak interface. ❏ Okterakt 🦊 UwU (talk) 15:27, 19 November 2025 (UTC)