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Forthcoming XT-IDE Board - Cast Your Vote

Forthcoming XT-IDE Board - Cast Your Vote

  • As original XT-IDE, with a 40-pin header only

    Votes: 4 10.5%

  • With a 44-pin header and board space to mount a 2.5" IDE HDD (i.e. a hard-card)

    Votes: 7 18.4%

  • With an optional Compact Flash socket (as master or slave) and a 40-pin header

    Votes: 26 68.4%

  • With a Compact Flash socket only

    Votes: 1 2.6%
  • Total voters
    38
  • Poll closed .
LucacHumach said:
Hay guys ,

My recommendation is to retire the XT-IDE V1 and V2 board projects and move on. Thanks!

Stylus Photo 710
Click to expand...

Hi
Yes, that was the plan and still is the plan. More than a year ago Hargle and I decided to retire the original XT-IDE board series to let the new builds like XT-CF and XT-Jr etc have a chance to grow.

So I got enough boards for those waiting on the list and just let original XT-IDE PCBs slowly fade away. However months later hobbyists continue to send me emails asking for the DIY XT-IDE V2 PCBs. They keep piling up and many hobbyists are repeatedly asking and getting increasingly frustrated with me for not releasing more new XT-IDE V2 PCBs. Eventually I pretty much have to do something or they'll be storming the house with torches and pitchforks.

I think there are multiple distinct types of XT-IDE hobbyists. Some like them pre-built and tested. Others like to make their own. The XT-CF boards tend to appeal to the former and DIY hobbyists (the hot soldering iron crowd) tend towards the latter. There may be less overlap than it might appear at first glance.

Que Sera, Sera. I would have thought the original XT-IDE boards would have been long dead by now but they seem to have taken on a life of their own.

XT-CF is a fine project and James has done a wonderful job. I am sure it will do well and it certainly is appealing. I admire his ingenuity and passion for the hobby. It is great design even though it is different than how I'd would do it. That doesn't make it wrong only a different approach with a different audience. Vive la difference!

Thanks and have a nice holiday!

Andrew Lynch
 
Andrew,

I would like to purchase 2 of your XT-IDE v2 boards. I don't think this is a case one storage medium over another. But demand may force a choice.

JJF
 
JJF said:
Andrew,

I would like to purchase 2 of your XT-IDE v2 boards. I don't think this is a case one storage medium over another. But demand may force a choice.

JJF
Click to expand...

Hi JJF

Please send me an email at LYNCHAJ@YAHOO.COM with XT-IDE in the title.

This is probably a more appropriate subject for PM or email rather than discussing on the forum.

The XT-IDE PCBs should be here in about 10 days or so. I will make a general announcement as soon as they arrive and those on the waiting list have a chance to get theirs. There will be some extra boards for builders who come later as well.

Thanks and have a happy holidays!

Andrew Lynch
 
I've put together a V3 board - schematic & PCB image and Eagle files here. I've reverted to the 44-pin CPLD used by the Dangerous Prototypes originally, since it's a lot easier to solder, and gone with a 5V supply to the CF header and DIP-32 flash package.

The CPLD is only to generating CF socket control signals (the data bus goes straight to the ISA socket per the lite board). The rough idea is to reduce load on the CPLD - there's only 9 outputs, and the pull-ups are to 3v3 now.

Hopefully it will do port IO (8 or 16-bits) and DMA via channel 3, and run in PC/XT slot-8 or PC/AT with reduced wait-states. Compared to the V2 it looses auto-detection of port address and configuration options, since there is space for only 5 switches: ROM can be D000h or D800h, and port can be 300h or 320h.

Any and all input on the board (electrically) would be very much appreciated.
 
pearce_jj said:
... since there is space for only 5 switches: ROM can be D000h or D800h, and port can be 300h or 320h.

Any and all input on the board (electrically) would be very much appreciated.
Click to expand...

D000h to EFFFh is in the UMB range. Other ranges would be HIGHLY desirable to avoid conflict with UMB. I realize that not many XT class machines use UMB, but my highly modified 5155 does and some clones can as well.

Greg
 
Thanks, the ROM range can be set in CPLD logic so doesn't affect the board particularly. I'll change the logic to say D000h or C800h.
 
32K is mapped, yes. This allows for programming the flash chip as a flat address space without any trickery. The XT-IDE Universal BIOS itself is currently only 8K, so there is 24KB free for any other purpose too (and it's byte-programmable).
 
Unknown_K said:
If you want to be future proof you are going about this all the wrong way....What we realy need is a device that mimicks a HD but in reality is just an ethernet device that connects to any server which runs a special bit of code that creates a virtual HD file for the system we want to use.
Click to expand...

Just seen this, looking for something else. I'm of this opinion too, and ATA over Ethernet (ATAoE) seems to be exactly what we need. The problem is how to program legacy Ethernet adapters (or embed their packet drivers into a ROM image), OR we look at running our own board with a single-chip Ethernet interface on it and programming that directly. However, if we could make it work the server side is already readily available in Linux.

For those not in the know, ATAoE is a very lightweight layer-2 protocol - it's direct encapsulation of ATA in Ethernet, not like iSCSI which is a layer-3 IP based protocol.
 
Quick update, some 15-months on! XT-CF(v1) was superceded by the XT-CFv2, but the prototypes steadily failed. The XT-CFv2 is therefore now abandonded, but I'm hoping for 3rd-time-lucky with the XT-CFv3 board, first prototypes for which will be available early March (due to lead time on the 5V CPLD).

In the mean tine, all the 7400-series based XT-CF-Lite PCBs have been sold, but I will arrange for another batch if there is demand. I'm also extended flash support to a lower-cost (and more readily available) part.
 
I'm very sorry to hear of the failures; I guess that means I have the last working board in existence? Email me privately if you'd like me to send the board back, and of course I'm happy to do testing of any further revisions.

Will the XT-CFv3 board include the same DMA/mem/port capabilities?
 
Hi Jim, Chucks is also working I think but I'm not sure how many power-on-hours either have had. The v3 has IO (8- or 16-bits) and DMA; memory-mapped isn't an option since the 44-pin CPLD ran out of wires and in any case 286+ or V20 can use REP INSW with the same timings as REP MOVSW, whilst for the 8088 DMA is faster. The v3 does keep slot-8/ZWS modes though :)
 
Thus far I'm not aware of any JR-IDE field failures. But I've only sent about 18 of them out to 14 owners. At least 3 people have been using them longer than the DP effort you led. I stopped working on the ISA version of it when you started to have success with this design including more features & speed. Maybe we should move the logic into a 1508 and try again? The MAX/Atmel parts are more pin constrained, but I'm sure there are a few compromise areas.
 
Can do. Being pin-constrained by the 5V Xilinx parts (44-pin) I dropped the data bus connections on both sides on the v3, which prevents memory-mapped mode since there is no way to laod the memory-mapped base address. It does have DMA though, since that's just port-IO, at the end of the day. Using 8-bit transfers completely eliminated the timing problems (fairly obviously).
 
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