3 Oct
2009
3 Oct
'09
6:56 a.m.
Jim Leonard wrote:
I wanted to let all of you know that the 2nd revision
of my friend's
PC/XT IDE controller is now available. For those of you not in the
know, this is a way of using modern IDE hard drives in your 8bit PC or
XT system. Works with drives up to 137G (your O/S also has to support
it; 8.4G is way more common) and Compact Flash->IDE controllers too.
CD-ROM support is likely coming eventually, but he has to write an
entire driver that MSCDEX would talk to.
They're being sold at cost: $30 for a kit to solder your own, $40 for a
pre-built and tested card.
These are not quite the end production unit, but darn close. Works in
PC/XT clones, as well as Tandy 1000 series machines (anyone who knows
how hard it is to get an IDE drive into a Tandy will appreciate this).
They are also going to be building one that will fit into a PCjr sidecar
someday. ;)
Details are available on the last message of this forum page:
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?t=12359&page=109
Just to clarify, this is a first run of the second revision cards. They
are limited in supply, and we are probably sending them to people who
did testing with the first round. So most of them will be spoken for.
For the privilege of having an early card, you've got to do some hard
core testing. We have found very few drives that refuse to work, but
they are out there. The BIOS is still being debugged, especially with
the earlier/smaller LBA drives.
I think it's a little early to say they are being sold yet .. I'd check
back on that thread in about two months to see how testing has gone, and
to wait for the next batch of pc boards to be made up. Early samples of
this kit work already so it's not a bad bet, but it's not production
quality yet either.
(I'm intimately involved in this project - I did the trace optimization
for this last batch of cards, and helped with the early design.)
Mike