Chuck(G)
25k Member
Reading the STDC manual, it's an interesting beast.
What sticks out first is that no sectoring is done on the hard disk--each track is handled as a single long sector of about 10K. The board has 64K of memory and the docs say that there are 4 read/write buffers and 1 verify buffer (that would amount to 50K of the 64K). Can you say "blocking and deblocking code"?
It's not clear if you can access the buffers using programmed I/O or if DMA is required. If the latter, I can see problems ahead. DMA was one of those things that was extremely variable between vendors. It might be possible to get the board to work without interrupts, however.
Like a lot of Cromemco stuff (particularly the later stuff) is somewhat scarce on programming information and this board is no exception. It was made to run with Cromix (no mention of CP/M is given).
Maybe Herb Johnson at Retrotechnology has programming information. Otherwise, if you're set on using the board, you'll have to do your own reverse engineering.
What sticks out first is that no sectoring is done on the hard disk--each track is handled as a single long sector of about 10K. The board has 64K of memory and the docs say that there are 4 read/write buffers and 1 verify buffer (that would amount to 50K of the 64K). Can you say "blocking and deblocking code"?
It's not clear if you can access the buffers using programmed I/O or if DMA is required. If the latter, I can see problems ahead. DMA was one of those things that was extremely variable between vendors. It might be possible to get the board to work without interrupts, however.
Like a lot of Cromemco stuff (particularly the later stuff) is somewhat scarce on programming information and this board is no exception. It was made to run with Cromix (no mention of CP/M is given).
Maybe Herb Johnson at Retrotechnology has programming information. Otherwise, if you're set on using the board, you'll have to do your own reverse engineering.