Q-bus to CF [was: IOmega]

[Gordon JC Pearce]

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