16 Apr
2007
16 Apr
'07
7:17 a.m.
On Sun, 15 Apr 2007, Jules Richardson wrote:
I think I've found what I'd been thinking of - Wilson Labs do an
MFM->SCSI bridge, and for some reason I'd convinced myself that they did
a flash equivalent.
I was referring to the IMSAI Super I/O board; $350 seems to buy you a
whole lot of connectivity to newer devices.
I'm thinking about the software as well as the hardware, though - if such
an emulated device were available, it'd probably be preferable to
teaching a number of operating systems how to speak to new hardware. Plus
I've got a couple of non-S100 machines where the MFM drive has proven to
be the achilles heel as well - it'd be useful in a number of places.
Cheers,
Simon.
I've a
vague idea that I've seen a commercial offering at some point in
the past, but obviously that'd be a fairly expensive move to make.
(Fairly? Oh, OK. Very.)
Yeah, I'd found something a year or so ago. I don't remember exact numbers
now, but it was well into the thousands (I don't recall if that were dollars
or pounds, but either way the numbers were still scary) I've got a
Northstar Horizon that I mentioned on here many, many years
ago and I've just started looking at it again; once I've got it up and
running it'd be nice to add some sort of permanent storage, but without
jettisoning one of the floppy drives. The SuperIO board is one option,
but I'd like to keep it as stock-Northstar as I can.
I'm not at all familiar with that board - but surely if you're willing to put
a non-stock emulated hard drive in the machine, that's no different to putting
a non-original S100 board into the machine which achieves the same storage
aims? Either strike me as trivially reversible should someone ever want to do
so, and neither approach would be "stock".