From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at
sydex.com>
On 1/10/2006 at 1:08 PM Dwight Elvey wrote:
Sorry for the late response. This was from the
begining of
October. Can you look into your manual and see if it has
the 8X300 controller chip with the WD11xx support chips?
If so, I'd be interested in a copy of it.
Hi Dwight,
Well, yes and no. The WD book doesn't have a thing on the 8X300 or 305
because it's not a WD part, but rather a Signetics part! I do have the
Signetics "Bipolar LSI Data Manual" which does detail both the 300 and 305;
is that what you're looking for?
Cheers,
Chuck
Hi Chuck
I was thinking you had information on one of the controller boards
based on the 8X300 with the WD11xx parts. I've already gotten
enough information on both the WD11xx and the 8X300 to create
a simple disassembler. I also needed some hardware specific
inputs because the board I'm looking at does specific hardware
The WD databook (at least the one I have) does have spec sheets for the
controller boards. These include a block diagram (but not a full
schematic) and the host interface specification, including the commands
you can send
fuctions based on the address that the 8X300 is
executing
( similar to many bit slice designs ). This required a custom
That is quite normal.
disassembler.
I'm told that the TRS-80 Model4 used these parts for their
hard disk controller. From looking at the code I have extracted
I have a 3rd party (Cumana) hard disk on my Model 4. It uses the same
driver software as the Radio Shack one, and contains a real WD controller
(I forget which one, WD1100, possibly). There is one very small
modification to said board, namely adding a kludgewire so as to bring the
5V rai to an otherwise unused pin on the host connector, this is used to
power the host address decoder chips on a separate board. Needless to say
this mod will not affect the commands, etc.
-tony