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8-Bit IDE Controller

Q

Quagmire

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Sep 23, 2008
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I'm "upgrading" my old Tandy 1000SX and need a 8-Bit IDE controller. Something like or similar to an Acculogic sIDE-1/16. Any leads would be greatly appreciated. eBay proves negative at this time.

Thanx,

Agent Orange
 
there should be one or two on ebay in the ebay stores section, but the prices are ridiculous. i'd also love to know if anybody finds something reasonable, but of course Orange has first dibs. :)
 
have we, as a group, ever looked into building our own and getting a small supply of them made up? After researching alternates to my SCSI problem on an XT, I see there are schematics posted for one, and I know that collectively we have the skillset to design and create such a card. I *might* even be able to ask some of my coworkers to help-we have a hardware design team, a couple board layout guys, and we get custom made PCBs made several times a year. Something like this would probably only take up an hour of their time.

I have no idea what a minimum order would be, or how much they would cost, or if parts can be sourced for such a relic, but I know I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I could, and I bet there are 10-20 others on this board alone would would do likewise.

Just thinkin.
 
I have a very simple 8 bit controller that uses 16 bit drives. It has maybe 20 or 30 74ls IC and a boot ROM. I think it is limited to 512meg drives though.

Anyone interested in trying to reverse engineer?
 
I have seen others mention doing this but its never panned out. Where is the schematic to build your own? Given that a dumb 8bit IDE controller requires no logic (just software or bios) I would think that a 16 bit variety would need some sort of flip flop and support chips to break 16bitters into 8 bits for the bus. The most simplistic solution would involve using a device driver to use the HD (I would not be against this solution if someone is willing to write a boot level driver for ide disk access) Or we need to integrate it into a bios which would be more complex for everybody since one would have to write a eeprom if they were assembling it themselves.

I guess I would be game for a pair; if someone was nice enough to take on the endevour!

hargle said:
have we, as a group, ever looked into building our own and getting a small supply of them made up? After researching alternates to my SCSI problem on an XT, I see there are schematics posted for one, and I know that collectively we have the skillset to design and create such a card. I *might* even be able to ask some of my coworkers to help-we have a hardware design team, a couple board layout guys, and we get custom made PCBs made several times a year. Something like this would probably only take up an hour of their time.

I have no idea what a minimum order would be, or how much they would cost, or if parts can be sourced for such a relic, but I know I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I could, and I bet there are 10-20 others on this board alone would would do likewise.

Just thinkin.
Click to expand...
 
The thread in question with schematics and stuff came from here:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?t=7243

of which the main point of interest is here:

http://www.mylinuxisp.com/~jdbaker/oldsite/SmallSys/8bitIDE.html

I admit, I have not really absorbed the details from that page yet.

If we designed our own, we could also add an option ROM to it, and I (and a few others here) have x86 assembly experience and could likely write the appropriate hooks for INT13 to double pump the 16 bit data.

edit:
kb2syd: I'd love to disassemble that option rom on your board. I bet just scanning the PCB would get us a layout as well. Those things are pretty simple...
 
Last edited:
How do I go about reading the boot rom on an ISA expansion card?

I'll try to disassemble the binary and see what it is doing. It is socketed so I guess I could pull it and send it out to someone, but I'd rather not.

Kelly
 
hargle said:
The thread in question with schematics and stuff came from here:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?t=7243

of which the main point of interest is here:

http://www.mylinuxisp.com/~jdbaker/oldsite/SmallSys/8bitIDE.html

I admit, I have not really absorbed the details from that page yet.

If we designed our own, we could also add an option ROM to it, and I (and a few others here) have x86 assembly experience and could likely write the appropriate hooks for INT13 to double pump the 16 bit data.

edit:
kb2syd: I'd love to disassemble that option rom on your board. I bet just scanning the PCB would get us a layout as well. Those things are pretty simple...
Click to expand...


Looks like a pretty simple layout. Probably fit on a 2.5" x 3.5" PCB quite nicely.

Perhaps, if I get some time, I'll fire up Eagle 5.2 and play around with it.
 
kb2syd said:
How do I go about reading the boot rom on an ISA expansion card?

I'll try to disassemble the binary and see what it is doing. It is socketed so I guess I could pull it and send it out to someone, but I'd rather not.

Kelly
Click to expand...

http://www.brutman.com/PCjr/pcjr_downloads.html
pcjrcart.zip should work for dumping the image of it out to a file. You shouldn't need to pull the chip off the board or anything, just boot to DOS, run this and it'll locate your option ROMs and save them to files.

there is one ebay store seller who has three of them, anally priced at $200 each.
Click to expand...

I certainly think we can get ours made for less than this. We might have to assemble them ourselves, which should be pretty easy, and if we add an option ROM to it, I will break the 512MB barrier in the int 13 support code.
 
Wouldn't an 8 bit SCSI card be more usefull then a low capacity IDE card? You can still find small SCSI HDs, and SCSI is a lower CPU hog then IDE.
 
Unknown_K said:
Wouldn't an 8 bit SCSI card be more usefull then a low capacity IDE card? You can still find small SCSI HDs, and SCSI is a lower CPU hog then IDE.
Click to expand...

My interest in this stems from the fact that I can't get my future domain 850-MER with 8.2 BIOS on it to work on a true IBM XT machine. It works on a zenith machine, but I wanted to be true blue, so I may have to abandon SCSI.

At work, I'm also working closely with IDE drives, so I'm very familiar with the ATA command set, and oddly enough, as of yesterday, I was actually tasked with creating an option ROM for an IDE controller, so my work and personal interest are running parallel at the moment. It's just meant to be. :)

and here's some scans of a device that I googled up:

http://home.fuse.net/bobwatts/acculogic 8 bit.htm

It looks incredibly simple, although I'm a software guy, not hardware.
 
I own a Silicon Valley ADP50 that I use in my 5160. It won't recognize drives over 500MB so I have it connected to a 340MB drive. Throughput on the machine is decent, 300KB/s read (drive is capable of more).

Would dumping this ROM help you guys?
 
Trixter said:
I own a Silicon Valley ADP50 that I use in my 5160. It won't recognize drives over 500MB so I have it connected to a 340MB drive. Throughput on the machine is decent, 300KB/s read (drive is capable of more).

Would dumping this ROM help you guys?
Click to expand...

yes please. I'll take all the option ROMs I can get my hands on.

A nice side effect is that if we disassemble your option rom, it is very possible that adding extended INT 13 support to push your card's capability up to 8.4 gig could be achieved.

This is turning out to be a lot of fun. I'm going to go pester our hardware layout guys and find out how much it costs to get a PCB made.
 
I, as Trixter, only have a ADP50L which works great, but am in need of more cards of this type, so any progress on this issue would be really appreciated.

I have dumps of the ADP50L bios and the Yuko D16-X (another IDE-AT in isa 8 bit card), if you want them, you have them :)
 
2 layer or 4 layer? 2 layer runs something like 30 + (number of boards x area in sq inches x 90 or so cents, US currency) it varies, especially if you want silk screens or solder masks. That was with neither, as I recall.
 
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