huh. I never thought about zip drives or tape drives.
I'm not sure how zip drives talk to the IDE controller. If it's just like a normal hard drive that uses INT13, then that should work just fine, but I suspect there are drivers required. Tape drives certainly don't use standard interfacing methods, so that's right out.
Since this controller is not a typical IDE controller, using industry standard IDE I/O ports, every IDE device that needs direct access to the hardware would require a custom driver to be written, and that includes CD/DVDs unfortunately.
I do plan on supporting DVD/CD drives eventually. I need to write an entire CD-ROM driver that MSCDEX would then talk to, and the driver development documentation I've read says that it will take roughly 4-6 weeks of full time work to develop such a thing. That likely equates to 20-40 weeks of part time work, especially if I get frustrated and abandon it.
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Depending on how these cards go, and depending on how tortured and gray haired from stress andrew wants to end up being, I'd be totally on board for future geek projects, such as floppy controllers and USB devices and anything else anyone wants. I think I've found that BIOS and low level DOS work is certainly my calling in life.