On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, Jim Leonard wrote:
I wanted to let all of you know that the 2nd
revision of my friend's
PC/XT IDE controller is now available. For those of you not in the
know, this is a way of using modern IDE hard drives in your 8bit PC or
XT system. Works with drives up to 137G (your O/S also has to support
it; 8.4G is way more common) and Compact Flash->IDE controllers too.
CD-ROM support is likely coming eventually, but he has to write an
entire driver that MSCDEX would talk to.
What am I not understanding about the need for this product? I have
about a half-dozen 8-bit ISA IDE controllers, mostly Seagate branded.
Didn't think they were particularly rare.
Steve
Funny, but now I know why the rest of us can't find them - you have a
personal stockpile! Most of us can't find them on eBay or other places.
This one has a BIOS that supports LBA mode drives. It was pretty funny
seeing DOS 7 boot on a PC XT 5160. The BIOS is also flashable, which is
a nice feature. (And we expect the source code to be openly available.)
There will be announcements and pointers to a proper page/site when
these things are more production ready.
Mike