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8-Bit IDE Controller

8-bit ide

8-bit ide

hargle said:
that's coming from me, with a little help from acculogic.
if you go back in the thread, we dumped the acculogic BIOS, I disassembled it, and I have been working it over to include support for enhanced INT13 support to give us 137G drives, as well as re-working the drive parameter translations so that O/Ses that don't use Eint13 (like DOS 6.22) can still see it as a 8.4G drive, as opposed to 504MB. I think 8.4G is plenty for an 8088 machine. :)

The original source is nearly all been removed by now, since it was ugly, poorly written (in my opinion) and kinda buggy. It will all be open source when it's finished and debugged.

I'd like it if we can build the card to allow software updates to an eeprom as well, in case other features or CD-ROM or compact flash support requires any firmware changes. In that case, I'll be writing a flash utility as well.

I'm a software engineer by day, and spent a pretty good portion of my career working with phoenix BIOS. I've written BIOS support for IDE controllers before (more at the chipset level than the INT13 level though)
Oddly enough, here at work, i am working on solid state drives, and one of the tasks i'm to do is build an option rom for a custom drive/controller we're building. So, work is getting someone who is really, really motivated to work on their option rom, and the community here is getting someone who has the experience of having done it before. It's a little gray as far as code written at work being shared to an open source project and vice versa, but really, these two projects are about as far apart on the spectrum as you can get-i don't see a conflict of interests at all.

so yeah, sorry for the horn tooting, but firmware is in good hands.
Click to expand...

Will you be selling this card? I will be wanting 2 of them :mrgreen:
 
wmmullaney said:
How far are you?
Click to expand...

on the software side, i'm going to go out on a limb and say it's 80% finished.
adding support for DMA, whatever might be required for CD-ROM and CF may push that back another 10%.

hardware side is nowhere close. druid is very busy, and we keep changing the design. I'd love to help out more with the hardware side, but I don't have the skillset to do it.

we've got 2 schematics to play with, but neither have option rom support, we don't have DMA support or jumper selections for addresses or IRQ/DMAs, and all of that needs to be added and tested as a hand built prototype. Then when the design is finalized we'll released it to a PCB manufacturer.

All of the boards will also be built by hand. I suspect we'll do a run of maybe 200 PCBs and build them up as people order them, or we can of course sell it as a kit and you can build your own. I think total cost for the card+parts should be $20 or less. Since I'm a slow solderer, if I build one for you, it may easily double the cost. ;) With DIPP based ICs and a PCB though, it should be pretty quick work to build one of these.

I'd like to see the whole thing be open source, from the schematic to the source code to the PCB layout and the bill of materials. I would be very angry if someone from here buys one and tries to re-sell it on ebay for $200.

Anyway, this is my big winter project-I'll do whatever I can to make this thing a reality by spring of 09.
 
God Save The Queen....Hic...thud.

I'm on top of stuff and I figure that, worse case, the card MAY be a little longer than a full-height 1/4 length card.

Depends on how much extra stuff goes in there.

On my initial board layout (several designs ago), it all fit on a quarter length card with room to spare for a ROM and some jumpers without any crowding.
 
hargle said:
on the software side, i'm going to go out on a limb and say it's 80% finished.
Click to expand...

Hi Hargle,

You might want to set up a 'sign up here' thread to have an idea how many people are interested..
I would certainly expect to sign up for at least two myself.
Then there is a dutch mailing list I could drop it.. but only after you are ready for it :)
 
Hi All!

One small piece of advice... do not accept any orders until you have hardware in hand. Accepting money in advance sets unrealistic expectations, commits you to delivery, and it is the road to hell.

When you receive the parts shipment, then take orders and deal in a "cash on the barrel head" only format. PayPal is a great way to go.

Arranging group buys, advance orders, etc are complex, time consuming, and just plain dangerous. There are many examples of this but the most recent one is the IMSAI II disaster well documented on comp.os.cpm.

Take it for what its worth...

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch
 
good advice all around, thanks andrew.

i have no problems bankrolling the entire thing as a startup and then taking orders as the hardware becomes available. i won't take a dime until i can actually ship something that works as promised. it's just the right thing to do. i also have plenty of storage space for spare cards and parts if need be.

i do think a show of hands for how many orders to anticipate might be a good idea though. i mean if we're looking at 500+ then maybe it does start to make sense to get them built by the manufacturer instead of doing them by hand.
i'll set up something for that once the prototype is further along and we're actually thinking about pulling the PCB trigger.

---
on the software side, i have now abandoned the driver idea, and am down to either creating a boot sector loader or putting my bios code into a rom emulator and plugging it into my SCSI controller. I think I've got all the parts I need to do that-just need to dust them off. that'll be quite the hoot-using a SCSI controller do load my option rom that talks only to hardware on a different card. hehe. hopefully I can work that out this weekend.
 
WD 8-bit IDE

WD 8-bit IDE

Here is my 8-bit IDE Card, when it boots up you see a memory address and it then goes to nothing, won't boot any IDE HD's I have tried or that CF IDE Card contraption either.

Perhaps the settings on the card are wrong?

wd.jpg


WDC (c) 1988
 
I'm in for at least 2 when you have them available.

You might want to consider a kit that would include the printed circuit card, hardware, all components and software. That would save a bunch on manufacturing/assembly costs.
 
gerrydoire said:
Here is my 8-bit IDE Card, when it boots up you see a memory address and it then goes to nothing, won't boot any IDE HD's I have tried or that CF IDE Card contraption either.
Perhaps the settings on the card are wrong?
WDC (c) 1988
Click to expand...

that might be an 8bit only card, which would require an XT-IDE type hard drive to work in it, or as you say, it may just be a jumper setting. that's exactly what we're going to eliminate with our card. you should (soon) be able to buy any hard drive off the shelf currently in stock and throw it on this card and drop it into your PC/XT and have it just work. Cd-ROM and CF support would be icing on an already delicious cake.

-----
in my world, i've got a prom-ice ROM emulator box, but the cable I have for it is for a 32 pin dipp eprom, not the 28 pin rom I have on my scsi controller, so I need to go wire up an adapter for it. shouldn't be that big of a deal, but it's yet another setback in my road to debugging. typical me.
 
hargle said:
that might be an 8bit only card, which would require an XT-IDE type hard drive to work in it, or as you say, it may just be a jumper setting. that's exactly what we're going to eliminate with our card. you should (soon) be able to buy any hard drive off the shelf currently in stock and throw it on this card and drop it into your PC/XT and have it just work. Cd-ROM and CF support would be icing on an already delicious cake.
Click to expand...

It will be interesting to see if 8-Bit PC users are as plentyfull as 8-Bit Apple II users looking for this sort of device..

:D
 
You might want to consider a kit that would include the printed circuit card, hardware, all components and software. That would save a bunch on manufacturing/assembly costs.
Click to expand...

yep, that's been considered. I think it'll be available like this:

software: free download from some web homepage. everything is always free (compiled binary, drivers, firmware source, schematic, layout files, etc)
All software info that i've collected through this project will be addressed on the website. gerrydoire has volunteered to make some nice pdf documents of all the info you'll need for jumper settings, etc. that'll all be online too.
kit: PCB+loose parts in a bag, you solder: $xx.xx (will include already programmed eeprom if we don't create a flash program)
Hopefully under $20.
built: finished card (a fully assembled and tested card in a static bag) $xx.xx
Hopefully under $40, depending on how much time it takes for me to hand assemble and test.
deluxe kit: finished card+8 or 10gig hard drive. I may have a lead on getting a lot of used xbox 1 hard drives, which are the perfect size for this application.*
$xx.xx (since the drives are used I'd sell them at whatever my cost is)

Just ideas. I think i'm getting a bit ahead of myself though.

* DOS 6.22 can see 8.4 gig drives without any drivers via multiple 2gig partitions, and 8.4g on an XT is an insane amount of storage. It's pretty pointless to put anything bigger in there, but the card should support up to 137gig natively, but your OS will need to as well, so be warned.
 
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I'm constantly amazed at all the fabulous developments happening for the old machines:

I was just at the World of Commodore here in Toronto, where Jim Brain was assembling some of his tiny 1 1/2" square SD card boards that replace the Commodore IEC disk drives, and Brian Lyons had one of his VIC20 Denial carts that contains pretty well every program ever created for the VIC; work is underway on IEEE SDcard and IDE HD interfaces for the PETs etc. as well, and of course everyone knows of Jeri Ellsworth's C64-on-a-chip, and the CommodoreOne... I still remember my amazement the first time I saw a joystick with the whole C64 inside it; too bad the marketing was such a disaster.

Meanwhile on the Radio Shack front, there's a new device just out that sticks a PC-compatible SD(HC)card on the serial port of a model 100 type notebook computer to replace the TPDD disk drive, as well as an internal flash RAM device that lets you select any option ROM you like as well as adding RAM storage, which make that old favourite remarkably useful even in today's environment.

And of course the Apple and Atari groups haven't been idle either, and there are folks like Andrew building 'new' CP/M systems, not to mention the replicas of the old favourites being built; exciting times, wish we'd had this stuff then...
;-)

Best of luck with your 8-bit IDE card!

mike
 
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When we get to the build stage, I'll work on that after we get the board designed.

The only problem I can see is getting back-plane brackets. We might have to have them made.
 
>Druid6900: "The only problem I can see is getting back-plane brackets. We might have to have them made."
Good point, but I suspect that kind of thing could be pricey in small quantities unless they are generic. Perhaps better to rip them off Winmodems and other useless cards that would otherwise be thrown out. :)
 
Two 2 bucks is berable I suppose, but I notice that the catalogue only lists model 9203 which is PCI. I wonder if other models are the same price or if they are special order. Presumably a 9206 for EISA/ISA is the appropiate one.
 
hmmmm.
there's a metal stamping place about a block away from where I work.
I wonder if I could just pull the bracket off my ISA SCSI controller, take it in there, and see if they could make more of them, and at what cost.

it really seems like we shouldn't have to make any more of them though-they should be in surplus computer electronics shops around the globe. I mean, provided the connecting tabs are on the correct side of the bracket, we can develop the PCB around the connector-it's not like we need to do anything custom.
 
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