27 Nov
2008
27 Nov
'08
5:22 a.m.
Quoting Christian Corti <cc at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de>:
That doesn't make sense. IDE stands for Integrated
Drive Electronics,
which means that the controller is located on the drive. Therefore IDE
controller cards don't exist,
This is indeed true, an IDE drive just looks like a controler chip and
is addressed that way.
and you can't
bride IDE to an ST-412
interface type drive.
I wouldn't say can't, but it is quite a challenge, your bridge board
would need to interpret the analog signals from the MFM controler,
re-assemble them back to digital, format them into IDE commands and
pass them along to the IDE drive.
It would also need to read the IDE drive, and then generate the analog
signals that the MFM card was expecting.
It's been done IIRC for floppy disks which also use MFM encoding,
though probably at a lower data rate.
And the (original) IDE controller is just a plain old
WD1003 integrated
on the drive PCB. "MFM" and "IDE" are register compatible, the
programming is the same, otherwise you would need an extra extension
BIOS for your IDE drives. And an IDE HBA can be built with just an
address decoder and some drivers/receivers (usually 74LS245).
Yes but that requires modification/replacement of the controler of the
machine, which of course may not be a PC, so the way the registers are
addressed may also be unknown. Whilst asuming the bridge board idea
could be implemented, as far as the computer is concerned it is
talking to an MFM drive so it should just work.
Cheers,
Phill.
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