--- William Levak <wlevak@cyberspace.org> wrote: > On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Ethan Dicks wrote: > As for the 9060/9090, this looks like a standard IEEE dual drive setup > except that the 6530 is replaced by a 128x8 byte RAM(6810) and 2K ROM. Right. > The I/O functions of the 6530 seem to be done by the controller board. Sort of. Commodore/Tandon split those functions into a SASI portion and a SASI to analog portion and used an off-the-shelf board to directly control the drive. > The manual says this has a 2900 series bit/slice processor(whatever that > is). The AMD 2900 was a 4-bit ALU (among other things) that was in common usage in the early 1980s for implementing just about anything you wanted to. I have seen eight of them ganged together to implement the VAX-11/730 and four of them in the vector coprocessor of the 6502-based arcade game Battlezone. > Page 6 of the schematics(188008) show what looks like a processor > and 4 memory chips. However, the lettering on the schematics is > unreadable. The numbers from these chips would help. My original C= copy is almost illegible, too. It's not the scanner's fault; it's Commodore for reprinting a copy of a copy of a copy. It's not explicitly labelled, but on 188008-006, part 9D appears to be the AMD 2900 (at least it has the right number of pins - 40). In any case, it's not going to be fruitful to reverse-engineer the "controller" board. It is a standard (for 1982) SASI<->ST-506 adapter board like the Adapted ACB4000 is for SCSI<->ST-506. I used to have a programmers manual for the board in the D9060, but I haven't seen it in ten years. The commands sent across the bus are going to look a lot like SCSI-1 commands. There is very little difference. The trick is going to be identifying the code that manipulates the 6522 and equating SASI signal names to bits in the VIA registers and then seeing what kinds of commands are getting sent. They are going to be essentially READs, WRITEs and FORMATs. That's all the farther we need to go. I still think it's possible that once the 2K ROM is understood, it can be reprogrammed to talk simple SCSI and drive a 20-50Mb drive with great success. I have enough spare parts that it's worth the effort to me. I even have a small box of DEC and Quantum 40Mb and 50Mb disks to throw at the problem. -ethan ===== Infinet has been sold. The domain is going away in February. Please send all replies to erd@iname.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com - 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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