Amiga 500/1000 IDE interface

[gizmomelb]

hi guys,

I just found this - supposedly supports autoboot if you have KS 2.05 or above.

http://www.students.tut.fi/~leinone3/ide/

The adapter plugs in to the 68000 socket, and the 68000 is placed on top of it. There is one IDE-connector. IDE-signals are buffered and generated with XC9572(XL)-TQ100, and the adapter also pretends to be the same as in Amiga 600, so it autoboots using KS3.1/V40.063 KS-ROM. So far, I have not tested the two boards I have assembled...

[Andec]

I spotted this the other day. I might have a go at building one. If nothing else, it would be good for storing ADF files on my A500

[DrF]

That looks nice and usefull :)
Never seen many IDE adaptors for the 500's

[alexh]

This guy was a member of this forum. He was asking Toni about Gayle registers so he could emulate the gayle IDE interface.

There are very few passive components on his board, not being a PCB engineer I dont know if that is good or bad, but I would have expected more. If you are an amature doing PCB design for the first time, passives are what you miss out. You just "wire up" the components, and do not include pull up or pull down resistors etc.

It would have been very cool if he'd added an 8Meg Fast RAM interface and a CF slot instead of an IDE connector.

[DrF]

@Alexh

WAS a member so he left :(
Thats a real shame this board has sooo much more to offer than ANY other Amiga board I been on.

That thing, now thinking about it kinda looks like the ACD IDE thingy, who wanted something like this here recently?

[alexh]

He made 2-3 posts to get the info he needed and never posted again AFAIK

[Jope]

He's rather active on the Finnish Amiga user group's forum..

This certainly isn't his first PCB and I think he's studing EE in the technical university of Tampere.

[DrF]

Has anyone actually thought of properly reverse engineering some of the old time add ons for the Amiga?

Not sure on the legal problems on that though, I guess it would come down to who owns the rights to what.

[alexh]

There is little market for them, you couldn't cover your costs selling them, you'd be wasting your time unless it was for fun.

Jens Schoenfeld of Individual Computing often reverse engineers stuff.

http://www.ami.ga

The main problem is that the programmable logic chips (CPLD/FPGA) on these addons are usually OTP (One time programmable) and you cannot read the settings from them. Meaning you have to re-create the hardwork inside them which is not obvious.

[DrF]

I would like to invest some of my time and money into bringing back old hardware using new designs, but I always wondered who owns the rights to what. Unless its a 100% brand new design, I mean if I made a 100% copy of a Apollo or something who would be sending me threatening letters :P

[alexh]

Nobody would care, plus you'd never be able to make a 100% copy because :

1) Some parts would be obsolete
2) Some parts would not be rOHs complient
3) You'd never read the programming data off most CPLD/GAL/PAL/FPGA

[Computolio]

That's a really cool idea. Too bad he gave up on it.

Wasn't there an IDE controller for the Atari ST that did pretty much the same thing? It pretended to be the same as the Stacy's HD controller or something.

[alexh]

STBook, not Stacy.

http://gem.win.co.nz/mb/atarihw/ide.html

[DrF]

That's a really cool idea. Too bad he gave up on it.

Wasn't there an IDE controller for the Atari ST that did pretty much the same thing? It pretended to be the same as the Stacy's HD controller or something.

AdSpeed did 1 for the ST I think too, since most there stuff was for Amiga and ST.