Re: Amiga Sidecar with XT-IDE?

From: hwarin_at_neuf.fr
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 13:21:07 +0200 (CEST)
Message-ID: <382524538.973503.1571311267134_at_wsfrf1421>
<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:12px">H‌i,<br>
<br>
I've been working on this in the starting of the year and fixed this for XT based Janus. All was described in XTIDE support at&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/timeline">http://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/timeline</a>&nbsp;by may 2019. Didn't found time to progress further since then, but I can help.<br>
<br>
<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:12px">Regards - Hervé</span>

<div class="gl_quote" style="margin-top: 20px; padding-top: 5px;">De : "Mia Magnusson"<br>
A : cbm-hackers_at_musoftware.de<br>
Envoyé: jeudi 8 août 2019 14:33<br>
Objet : Re: Amiga Sidecar with XT-IDE?<br>
&nbsp;
<div class="gl_quoted">Den Sat, 3 Aug 2019 18:31:34 +0300 skrev Ville Laustela<br>
:<br>
&gt; Hi.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; &gt; Mia Magnusson kirjoitti 2.8.2019 kello 11.42:<br>
&gt; &gt;<br>
&gt; &gt; http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=95985<br>
&gt; &gt;<br>
&gt; &gt; According to the linked thread, you can use PCPrefs to select which<br>
&gt; &gt; 64k PC memory area to be used by the Janus PC-Amiga bridge, and the<br>
&gt; &gt; selection seems to be Axxxx, Dxxxx and Exxxx.<br>
&gt; &gt;<br>
&gt; &gt; Does this differ between the A2088 and the 1060 sidecar? My<br>
&gt; &gt; impression were that they were the same.<br>
&gt; &gt;<br>
&gt; &gt; If this isn't switchable, are you sure that the 1060 really uses the<br>
&gt; &gt; whole C0000-DFFFF area?<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; I was under the impression that putting Janus everywhere else but<br>
&gt; Exxxx would cause problems or the Janus-Amiga communications to not<br>
&gt; work, but I am not completely sure. This is all a bit complex.<br>
<br>
Oh, I just assumed that the software would work with all the settings.<br>
Can't really understand why it would be user configurable otherwise.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; &gt; Btw, not sure if it will work but if it's possible to load XTIDE<br>
&gt; &gt; from disk you might be able to have the bios on a 5.25" diskette<br>
&gt; &gt; together with DOS.<br>
&gt; &gt;<br>
&gt; &gt; Btw if you go for my suggestion of using a network card, you might<br>
&gt; &gt; be able to fit the XTIDE-BIOS in the boot rom socket on the network<br>
&gt; &gt; card. That might lead to problems though as my impression is that<br>
&gt; &gt; the XTIDE stores it's settings in the BIOS and assumes that the<br>
&gt; &gt; BIOS is an EEPROM. Writing to EEPROMs is surely not supported on a<br>
&gt; &gt; network card.<br>
&gt; &gt;<br>
&gt; &gt; Btw, if you get XTIDE-BIOS to work using the boot rom socket on a<br>
&gt; &gt; network card, you won't need the XTIDE card as XTIDE BIOS can use a<br>
&gt; &gt; 16-BIT ISA card in an 8-bit ISA slot and give you full functionality<br>
&gt; &gt; using CF cards and 50% capacity of physical disks. With todays<br>
&gt; &gt; relative large sizes of disks that's more or less free, it won't<br>
&gt; &gt; matter much if you can only access say 5GB of a 10GB disk…<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; I am not sure if XTIDE can be loaded from file, but that would be an<br>
&gt; easy solution. It would still require a boot floppy, but that<br>
&gt; wouldn’t be too bad.<br>
<br>
Any time in the future I'm going to investigate this a bit more. Not<br>
Amiga related but I have a Panasonic luggable PC compatible (with CRT)<br>
that could benefit from some kind of XTIDE too.<br>
<br>
&gt; Do you mean a 16-bit ISA card would work if I would get the XTIDE ROM<br>
&gt; loaded? Are they all 16-bit compatible of just some of them?<br>
<br>
Afaik that works. The IDE interface uses 8-bit communications for<br>
everything except the actual data transfers, and CF cards can be set to<br>
an 8-bit transfer mode. The result is that every second byte is lost on<br>
a mechanical disk, while a CF card can be used directly.<br>
<br>
&gt; &gt; P.S. what other hardware does your A1000/A1060 setup have? Most<br>
&gt; &gt; other solutions is probably faster than using the A1060 + PC hard<br>
&gt; &gt; disk as an Amiga hard disk.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; At the moment nothing else. My A1000 has a boot selector for using a<br>
&gt; HxC for booting. I would like to keep the A1000 as original and just<br>
&gt; equip it with contemporary expansions. I am sure there would be much<br>
&gt; easier CPU/RAM expansions to install, but I’d like to keep the first<br>
&gt; one as original :)<br>
<br>
Yeah, on an A1000 it's nice to keep stuff as original as possible.<br>
<br>
<br>
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<div class="gl_quoted">&nbsp;</div>
</div>
Received on 2020-05-29 23:12:39

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