On Thu, 3 Dec 1998, Ruud Baltissen wrote: > I just finished the HW of the interface to connect a IDE-harddisk with a > C64. Have you compared it with the one designed for the Oric, which is a 6502 computer? I think that the schematic is available either from <URL:http://www.ensica.fr/oric/> or from Alexios Chochoulas' site <URL:http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/%7Ealexios/>. I didn't find it at either place, but I got the impression that they got the hardware running in the summer of 1997. As I haven't heard anything since, I think that they ran into huge problems with software. > Now the testing phase starts. FYI, it is built with 7 common available ICs. Congratulations! It is extremely important that there are no programmable logic chips or other chips that are difficult to obtain. > The next problem is: what to do with the whole thing? The German proverb "Good question. Next question?" applies here. I think that the programming effort is too big. Interfacing the thing to the IEC bus á la CMD's hard disks would be a waste of resources (both design effort and computer resources; DMA transfer to the memory of the C64 would be much faster), but it would ensure maximum compatibility (except with fastloaders and copy-protected stuff). I suggest that you use André Fachat's OS/A65 as a base for the system. Didn't he already have a filesystem implementation? Emulating 1541-like or 1581-like disks is not an option, since the maximum would be 255 tracks and 256 sectors, which is less than 16 megabytes. As someone recently pointed out in comp.sys.cbm, it's not nice to divide a 4-gigabyte hard disk to at least 256 partitions. In my opinion, interfacing a hard disk directly to the C64 doesn't make sense, except if you are religious about it and want to do without a PC. Speaking of which, last year you and Frank were playing with the thought of connecting the C64 to a PC with DMA, so that the PC can access RAM and I/O in the C64 address space without requiring any software to be downloaded to the C64 first. I'd like to see something like that in action. Marko - This message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list. To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe | mail cbm-hackers-request@dot.tcm.hut.fi.
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