24 Apr
2007
24 Apr
'07
1:32 a.m.
On 23 Apr 2007 at 18:47, Jules Richardson wrote:
Wouldn't it take a fair while to reverse-engineer
all the address decoding and
additional logic (such as for driving the LCD) in the system? i.e. just to
find out exactly what you have in order to start thinking about writing
software is reasonably non-trivial.
That's why we have disassemblers, no?
It's probably nothing like as much as
designing/building something from
scratch, but then at least with doing something from scratch there's the
benefit of knowing exactly how it fits together. Plus I suspect for many
people, designing from a box of chips ends up being more rewarding...
Probably so--but then I said that I was lazy. ;-) Even in the
"assemble it from chips" case, I'd rather use a Z180/Z280/64180/EZ80.
Less wiring to do.
Hmm, do they? I passed up on some '386 ones
recently (I was briefly tempted
mainly for the 40x2 displays). Some more SRAM would have been nice to have,
though...
Well, look at this one on our favorite auction site:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260110039855
Quite a bit of stuff in there for $20.
From a programming point of view, how easy is
accessing IDE compared to a
typical FDC ('765 or similar)? I did write some assembler to access an IDE
drive about 12 years ago, but have long since forgotten details! :-)
CF IDE is easy--it's 8 bit. HD IDE uses a 16-bit data path for
sector data transfer, so that makes things a bit more involved.
Otherwise, the register set looks pretty much like a WD1003 PC-AT
type disk controller.
Cheers,
Chuck