Hi! A while back I mentioned the N8VEM SBC which is a new Z80 home brew project designed in the "classic" late 1970's style. There was some discussion about the merits of using RAM/ROM drives versus "real" drives like IDE hard drives and floppy disk drives. Work continues on the N8VEM project to include supporting "real" drives. The SBC PCB and the ECB backplane PCB are basically done and available for builders to make their own home brew Z80 CP/M computer. The next project is an ECB bus monitor, which is basically done awaiting the PCB order, and the next project is the Disk IO board. I am currently working on the Disk IO board as my main activity. The Disk IO board is comprised of two parts; an IDE interface and a FDC interface. The IDE section is basically done, works just fine, and is supported in the CBIOS. No doubt it could be improved with some TLC but it works well enough for my purposes. Like the rest of the N8VEM project, it is comprised of "standard" commonly available DIP parts with no custom or programmable elements except for the SBC EPROM. I am currently working on the FDC section and making some progress thanks to some wise and very helpful persons (you know who you are!) The design exists, is based on a NEC 765 reference design at the ALPACA project, and a working but obviously still in development prototype board is on my bench. As part of the development, I am writing a "disk monitor" program to exercise the i8272 FDC chip. Currently, I can use it to read sectors from a 320K IBM PC MS-DOS formatted 5.25" floppy disk in a Tandon TM100-2A minifloppy drive, print status, dump sector memory, etc. If anyone would like to join in the development of the Disk IO board, please contact me to discuss. I am making slow but steady progress but am sure having another set of eyes to review and write code would help a lot. This would be a great way to make your own Z80 CP/M home brew computer WITH "real" drive support. http://groups.google.com/group/n8vem Thanks and have a nice day! Andrew Lynch