Quote:
Originally Posted by plasmab
The 030 board is almost done. Just the IDE left to do. Then its just performance tweaks.
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IDE = It's Done Eventually.
Actually it's not that straightforward for an A500 - I guess you are going to have to pick a minimum Kickstart to be compatible with. 1.3 was the first with autoboot. Not many 1.3 Amigas had hard drives at the time, and limiting it to a 2 or higher might save you some headaches.
I guess after that, it's a question of using Autoconfig so that the A500 has some idea of how to access the drive, from the minimum KS selected, using the libararies and device drivers available (typically SCSI.device, also ATAPI.device).
Most inbuilt Amiga IDE support is crap, and depends on an A1200 or A4000 design. Both 3.0 and later. But, the firmware for the controllers isn't operable in A500 V3 and higher ROMs, because the A500 does not have such a port built in.
The commercial IDEFIX has quite a bit of driver support, but it's commercial. Available in IDE97 and IDE99 flavours, trying to get support for 64-bit and also boosting transfer speed (the A1200 controller was only designed for one drive). I'm not saying make it dependent on the driver (not a good move) but studying those might give you some insights into what you need to do to make your IDE port work well on an A500.
HDToolbox is of course the standard CBM utility to prepare, wipe, and partition drives. Usually with "Quick" formatting, as the standard format command is hardware limited to partition size. That's about as much as I can say with confidence - and is probably far less than you already know.