• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

8-Bit IDE Controller

I am not in to modding my vintage stuff yet either, however until someone finds a way to repair old dead MFM drives such as the ST-412, I am going to make that choice to retire my working drives so 5 or 10 years from now it will still be working. and someone like your self mike that makes the choice to keep useing the MFM drives will eaither have to use the IDE card or not have any MFM drives left, they are all running on borrowed time!

You're obviously overlooking that many of them go tits-up from sitting around unused. If ya keep 'em running there's less chance of stiction gluing the heads to the platters.

--T
 
You're obviously overlooking that many of them go tits-up from sitting around unused. If ya keep 'em running there's less chance of stiction gluing the heads to the platters.

--T
You're preaching to the choir; FF was making that very point, while I'm the fool putting my faith in Miniscribe (RIP). Actually, the only drives I've had stiction issues with have been certain Seagates; the small Miniscribes and Micropolis drives seem to be just crude enough to last a long time. Even one of the infamous Kaloks still worked last time I tried it (and you knew it - one of the loudest drives ever).

But see above; like the buddy that you only need to stay one step ahead of when you're both being chased by a bear, just a few of the drives need to outlast me (or just stay running until I flog 'em).
 
No I am not overlookin' it, that why I will fire up a few times a year to keep that from happening!

I have several MFM hard drives fail on me over the last while, one was brand new, died 3 months of use.

I gave up buying MFM HDS and use IDE to CF now.
 
I have several MFM hard drives fail on me over the last while, one was brand new, died 3 months of use.

I gave up buying MFM HDS and use IDE to CF now.
HERESY! *Real* men scoff at IDE and CF! In my day we made new disk platters out of old hubcaps and stole heads and motors out of cassette players...
 
I'm still testing everything IDE with my Acculogic.

So far the only CF card that will work with it is a 128meg.

256 CF didn't work, a 2 gig CF didn't work, waiting for a 512meg one to come in, probably won't work, but never know till you try.

:>

I know why! (preliminary results anyway)
I found my IDE-CF adapter last night and gave it a whirl on our card. It worked, sorta. The 1G card I had worked with some minor timing issues that I need to try and address. The 128MB card that I received from justJunk to help with this project didn't work. I could ID the device, but it reports zero user addressable sectors.

Here's why:
It looks to me like cards below a certain size will report back to the IDE adapter as requiring CHS addressing mechanisms only. Our controller doesn't support CHS, so it failed on the 128MB card.

My 1G card would report as being LBA addressable, so the the card worked.

The acculogic card has the exact opposite problem. It only can address cards up to 528MB, and only in CHS mode. If the CF device doesn't respond to CHS addressing because it uses LBA, then it'll fail on that card.

The 512MB card you're about to receive could be anyone's guess as to how it'll work. It may even vary from vendor to vendor. Both cards I had were from sandisk.

That kinda seals the deal for me that I need to add CHS addressing in my BIOS though, which makes me sad, but does mean that it'll be that more robust in the end, so that's a good thing.
 
I know why! (preliminary results anyway)
I found my IDE-CF adapter last night and gave it a whirl on our card. It worked, sorta. The 1G card I had worked with some minor timing issues that I need to try and address. The 128MB card that I received from justJunk to help with this project didn't work. I could ID the device, but it reports zero user addressable sectors.

Here's why:
It looks to me like cards below a certain size will report back to the IDE adapter as requiring CHS addressing mechanisms only. Our controller doesn't support CHS, so it failed on the 128MB card.

My 1G card would report as being LBA addressable, so the the card worked.

The acculogic card has the exact opposite problem. It only can address cards up to 528MB, and only in CHS mode. If the CF device doesn't respond to CHS addressing because it uses LBA, then it'll fail on that card.

The 512MB card you're about to receive could be anyone's guess as to how it'll work. It may even vary from vendor to vendor. Both cards I had were from sandisk.

That kinda seals the deal for me that I need to add CHS addressing in my BIOS though, which makes me sad, but does mean that it'll be that more robust in the end, so that's a good thing.

Well for the hell of it, I tried the 256 meg card again, this time as a slave, drive D:, guess what, it worked, formatted as 256 megs etc, as a primary boot drive the computer just sits there and hangs.

I haven't filled the 256 meg card with much data, to see if there was any other quirks, but as it stands, the card seems to work fine as a slave.

With this in mind, I figured I'd try my 2gig card as slave, it worked also as a slave and it formatted to the dos limit of 500megs.

So if you have an Acculogic, put a 128 meg on it as a boot hd C:,
us the second connector as a d: drive and it will more than likely accept any CF card and format it to the dos limit.

The 2Gig card is modern, Lexar Platinum II 80x, reduced to dos level 1/2 gig on a computer made in the dark ages :mrgreen:
 
I'm using PC Dos 2000, and it only sees up to 512 megs or so.
That's all you're going to get on the acculogic. It has the 528MB barrier in full force in its BIOS. When I'm finished with our card, I am still planning on updating that acculogic BIOS with barrier breaking enhancements, so just hang in there and we'll get that card seeing even bigger drives.

that is really interesting that it works as a slave and not as a master.
I have a *lot* of playing around to do on our card to make sure all of this stuff works as expected. This is putting of my writing of a CD-ROM driver, but I think its work that should be done first.
 
That's all you're going to get on the acculogic. It has the 528MB barrier in full force in its BIOS. When I'm finished with our card, I am still planning on updating that acculogic BIOS with barrier breaking enhancements, so just hang in there and we'll get that card seeing even bigger drives.

that is really interesting that it works as a slave and not as a master.
I have a *lot* of playing around to do on our card to make sure all of this stuff works as expected. This is putting of my writing of a CD-ROM driver, but I think its work that should be done first.


I figured if the CF card didnt work as a master, why would I try it as a slave, but there you go...

When you going to enhance my Acculogic bios, I'm dying out here :rolleyes:
 
I figured if the CF card didnt work as a master, why would I try it as a slave, but there you go...

When you going to enhance my Acculogic bios, I'm dying out here :rolleyes:

or just buy one of our cards and sell your acculogic on ebay. you'll get 5x the amount you paid for our card, so you'll come out ahead and end up with a better piece of hardware!

seriously though, our card gets top priority, so it won't be until after our card is shipping til I could possibly do any work on the acculogic. a few months minimum.
 
or just buy one of our cards and sell your acculogic on ebay. you'll get 5x the amount you paid for our card, so you'll come out ahead and end up with a better piece of hardware!

seriously though, our card gets top priority, so it won't be until after our card is shipping til I could possibly do any work on the acculogic. a few months minimum.

How about we start our own company,
you can be woz and you can call me mr. jobs, i bet we could make millions on your inventions :D :D :D
ok ok that idea was taken already...

It will be interesting to see how many 8-bit PC enthusiasts are out there when the card is ready..
 
It will be interesting to see how many 8-bit PC enthusiasts are out there when the card is ready..

A whole lot more than we're expecting. I predict that the first run (50-100) will fly off the shelves in a few days to a couple weeks (especially if the price can be kept in around the $50.00 range).

--T
 
Web hosting

Web hosting

What kind of web hosting do you need? I may be able to help there, just let me know.

This is an awesome project, and I am pleased with the results, and if the final card is $50 I'd buy it, in fact I'd even buy it at $100.
 
A whole lot more than we're expecting. I predict that the first run (50-100) will fly off the shelves in a few days to a couple weeks (especially if the price can be kept in around the $50.00 range).

--T

I will be picking up 2 myself.
 
i still think this is awesome...

too bad it doesn't include a floppy controller with 1.2/1.44 support as well...

but i guess you can get those for about $30 bucks anyway...

keep up the good work... and keep us updated with progress...

when does the beta program start :)

i got 2 XT machines itching for ide :) and a couple of 4gb microdrives ready to rock...

later,
Chris
 
Latest status:

PCB: we're likely to send off to have a small run (5 or 10) boards built sometime this month. Those will be distributed to other testers to try and break the design/code.

Hardware: Minor hardware tweak to get some slightly faster buffering in place. This fixed all the various timing issues I had during ID through POST. Hardware seems to be very stable. Works both in an XT and in my 486 test platform, so there are no CPU specific speed issues.

Software: EEPROM Flash program written and functional. Slight tweaks required, but it is working to do software BIOS updates.

BIOS is working well. Basic INT 13 and Enhanced INT13 is working fine. All drive manufacturers that I've tested (conner, seagate, WD and maxtor) all work to read/write sectors. Fdisk, Formatted and booted to my 1G compact flash card last night. The 128MB card does not support LBA access, so that doesn't work.

Todo: CHS support, boot menu/options, optimizations, IRQ support, CD-ROM driver.

Needs testing: cable select, 2 drives, drive w/CD-ROM, failing hard drive error reporting, multiple controllers.

Known issue: Old HDD benchmark called coretest doesn't work. It's doing something outside of INT13 that I don't understand yet, as it ends up issuing read commands to device 80h, which is normal, and then to device 41h, which should (and does) fail. Same test on a normal controller never accesses device 41h. All INT13 responses appear the same.

Overall, we're on target for a release this summer.
 
I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to these.

I should "warn" you, though, that I plan to use mine almost exclusively with CF cards + CF->IDE adapters. Shouldn't be a problem, right?
 
I should "warn" you, though, that I plan to use mine almost exclusively with CF cards + CF->IDE adapters. Shouldn't be a problem, right?
That should be fine, probably the larger/newer CF the better, especially since i'm going to be lazy about adding CHS support for awhile. My sample size of 2 CF cards may not be very indicative of how CF support is working overall though. Anyone want to send me additional cards to test with?

My generic CF->IDE adapter and a Sandisk Extreme III 1Gig card seems to work beautifully.

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-SDCFX3-1024-901-Extreme-CompactFlash-Package/dp/B0007876PC
(that seems really expensive though)

I suspect that there's no need to be "extreme" at 4.77MHz. ;)
 
Back
Top