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A New S100 Bus Disk Controller Board

monahan_z

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 19, 2008
Messages
263
Location
San Ramon, CA
This Board took well over a year to build! It went through 10 prototypes (so far), and is now split into 3 separate S100 boards of increasing complexity. The overall concept was to design an S100 bus Disk Controller board that could handle any IDE Disk Drive, any SD or CF card and any Soft Sectored Floppy disk 8”, 5” or 2.5”, Up to two IDE drives and four floppies. The critical concept being that an onboard FPGA Z80 CPU (running up to 40mHz) would handle all drive initialization, format determinations and all sector read and writes totally transparent to any CPU on the S100 bus. Under CPM or MSDOS the S100 CPU only interfaces with the drives via two IO ports and a series of simple byte commands. A very simple generalized BIOS can be written by almost anybody. The project is far from finished, but I have running prototypes I’m comfortable with at long last.

I have decided to split the board into 3 boards.

A board for the IDE/CF/SD card drives. Called FPGA_DC+IDE

A board for all the Floppy Disks mentioned above. called FPGA_DC+FDC

And a more complex board combining the above two boards, called FPGA_DC+IDE+FDC

The FPGA_DC+IDE Board is now done and appears to be rock solid. So, I am opening it up for our users to obtain one or more bare boards. These are complex boards so I highly recommend you step things along.

Please see here for a complete description of the board.

http://s100computers.com/My%20System...DC%20Board.htm

I’m doing the board ordering a little different this time. Rather than sign-up here please go to the S100Computers web page and fill out the simple order form.

http://s100computers.com/My System Index Page.htm

This will send me directly your name and address. Fill it out carefully as I’m going to simply lift the whole address box text to the package label.

Please do not order a board any other way.

As usual the boards will be done by PCBCart (China). Will cost ~$20-$25/board depending on number etc. (Huge import tax on stuff from China these days but they do outstanding work).

The other two boards are a few months off but all 3 use the same software, formats etc.




John Monahan

S100Computers.com
 
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