28 Feb
2008
28 Feb
'08
12:41 a.m.
On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 00:19 -0500, tiggerlasv at aim.com wrote:
I stopped holding my breath for creation of a Q-Bus IDE
controller a long time ago. While I like to think that I
do a reasonable job troubleshooting some problems,
I'm definitely not a hardware/software engineer.
It would have been nice, but it makes more sense
these days to go Q-Bus to SATA. I would imagine
that it would be alot less hassle, and certainly alot less
real estate on the board, with the smaller connectors,
and fewer traces.
Actually SATA is extremely exacting and needs unbelievably complicated
controller chips.
PATA, on the other hand, is just a fast parallel port. You can hook a
CF card up to anything, even a microcontroller, with just a tiny amount
of glue logic.
At any rate, back to the topic, Q-Bus to Compact
Flash.
If you can do Q-bus to Compact Flash, then you can do
Q-bus to IDE, because CF *is* an IDE interface.
Those wonderful CF to IDE adapter boards generally don't
have any circuitry on-board, except to drive status LED's.
Exactly. Simply grafting a PATA interface onto a QBus card is trivial.
Actually getting something that will either pretend to be an existing
controller or writing a device driver for the operating system in use is
much much harder.
If you really wanted to push this forwards, write me some MSCP
controller firmware for an Atmel microcontroller...
Right now, I have Compact flash / IDE on my Q-bus,
albeit in a round-about way.
I have older CMD SCSI controllers (CQD-200's).
Attached to those are ACard 7720U SCSI <> IDE adapters.
http://www.acard.com
These seem to crop up on the various sampler mailing lists I'm on, as a
way of using CF with older samplers which often have "funny" SCSI
implementations.
Gordon