[Coco] Q: Burke & Burke hard disk controller

[tonym]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Phill Harvey-Smith afra at aurigae.demon.co.uk
>Sent 9/30/2008 1:52:04 PM
>To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts coco at maltedmedia.com
>Subject: Re: [Coco] Q: Burke & Burke hard disk controller
>
>Ciaran Anscomb wrote:
> Steven Hirsch wrote:
> Or, will a 16-bit IDE drive work while throwing away half its 
> capacity (no access to the upper byte of data)?
>
> Yes, this definitely works. I recently picked up an IDE/CompactFlash
> interface off Ebay for the BBC Master, and it is an 8-bit interface.
> 8 bits of each 16-bit transfer are simply discarded.
>
>That wouldn't happen to be the RetroClinic one would it ? If so what do 
>you think of it ?
>
> Looking around a bit revealed that at least the most common ATA commands
> are all contained within 8 bits.
>
>Something I started playing with, and must get back to is a 16bit IDE 
>interface for XT type computers, my idea was to buffer the high byte on
>reads, and the low byte on writes so as to take advantage of 16 bit 
>read/write operations having less fetch/execute overhead. It did make a 
>difference acording to nortons speeddisk.
>
>I guess the same principle could also be applied to the CoCo/Dragon, but 
>would probably have little advantage on the BBC, which is 6502 based, 
>from my little knolwege(sp?) of 6502, it has no 16 bit operations.
>
>


Look up the GIDE interface by Tillman Reh (sp?).
It was designed to piggyback into the Z80 socket, so it may be a start.

Since ya mentioned the word Dragon....
Are CoCo hardware expansions Dragon-compatible? ie, MPI, RS232Pak, etc...?
I thought I read somewhere, that there was a replacement ROM to use in CoCo FDC's, to
allow them to work in the Dragon?

Now, if older stuff works, what about newer stuff like C9's TC^3 / SuperIDE?
NitrOS9? I see mention of Dragon in the source.....



T