A500IDE works!

[SamuraiCrow]

Didn't he design the Catweasel floppy controller?

[Generale]

That could very well be it. It was bothering me not knowing where I knew the name.
If anyone has tried the project and had different RAM use stats, could you please tell me?
In the meantime I may have to doctor a RAM expansion. New thread time.

[clockmstr]

Well done, it a good feeling isn't it when that mess of wires you have just soldered together actually works.

I've got pictures of my second prototype in the images section that plugs into the CPU socket.

BTW, how long is your IDE cable that you are using?
I found only the shortest ones work reliably especially with a CD-ROM as a slave as well.

[Generale]

the distance from the controller to the hdd is 10-15 cm. If you want extra distance, an 80 conductor cable may help. After all, they are designed to sink crosstalk.
I'm just using a 40conductor cable though. Standard IDE length. It's trailing end is currently draped over the hard drive and near the PC monitor, so i'm surprised it works.

I was wondering if using the CPU socket would work. Guess so!

by the way.... What's the rough memory eaten by your drive? like I said earlier its eaten about 250k of ram. I was just wondering if its only me thats having that problem.

It is a good feeling seeing something work though. I thought I'd never get it running.

[B00tDisk]

Man, Generale, as sharp as you are I'm surprised you haven't started on an A500 CPU upgrade project.  

[Generale]

Heh. I've been tempted. but the prob is that CPUs cost $. And the reasons I build instead of buy are twofold.
1: I don't pay for anything that I can do myself.
2: It's in my price range.

I did come up with an idea on how to 'upgrade' a 68k today which I actually came up with ages ago to trick up a 6502 (but never tried). If I say what it is I'll probably be burned at the stake as a heretic.

Alternatively.....I can't remember how the interrupt handling works on a 68k. If it's anything like MIPS RISC I can cheat. It's amazing what a person can do with an interrupt handler and some overclocking.

I want to try a CD-ROM on my Ami. But I can't  :-( Apart from power drain concerns, is there any support available for ISO9660 in wb1.3 anyway?

[clockmstr]

The Xetec driver on l8r.net supports KS1.3, so that should work for the CD-ROM. I used KS/WB2.x so the choice of CD filesystems was greater though I can't remember which one I actually ended up using. AsimCDFS I think.

Memory useage by the driver was a little under 250k I think, I will plug it in and check it out time permitting.

Another way to overcome the cable issue is to add some buffers to the interface which isn't difficult but with short lengths I didn't deem it necessary.

I made a startup disk that loaded the driver and passed the remainder of the startup-sequence and assigns to the harddrive to speed up booting though I too did consider a modified ROM based driver to autoboot from the HDD but I never got very far with that idea due to lack of time.

I may still look into it though.

I also built the 14mhz hack and it works fine with 68000's from later (rev 6+) A500's. I ended up using a socketed square 68000 from an A600 for my project wired into a standard DIL 68000 CPU socket.

Regards,

Clockmeister.

[B00tDisk]

Generale wrote:
Heh. I've been tempted. but the prob is that CPUs cost $. And the reasons I build instead of buy are twofold.
1: I don't pay for anything that I can do myself.
2: It's in my price range.

Well how much does a bare 060 or hell even a low end G3 CPU cost?  I'd be willing to donate to that project.

[Azryl]

@generale

Ralph Babel has a KS1.3 Cd-rom driver here

http://babel.org/amiga/#omni

connect everything up, see if it works :-)

Laugh at me if my question is stupid, but would a CDTV KS1.3 ROM fit in an A500 rom socket, and more importantly would it be of any use?

[mjg59]

The CDTV 1.3 ROM is identical to the A500 one. The CDTV has a pair of extra ROMs that patch themselves into the system at boot time.

[Generale]

hm. So many bits and pieces to reply to. I'm guessing most people here are either vampires or in a different timezone.

Okay. First yeah, buffers work wonders. Especially a nice high speed CMOS buffer. Preferably a schmitt triggered. It'll have those signals nice and crisp. Which is needed moreso if its under the cpu. I suggested the 80 connector cable because its cheaper and simpler.as for better, probably not.

Thanks for the URLs for the drivers. I'll definitely have to try them out. I know I can play audio CDs atm, but it hasn't been enough to justify connecting a cd-rom. I do know the first audio cd and song I'll test it with though. Can you guess what they are?

So it wasnt just me the driver was big for. Hm. Well, an ide interface should only be a few hundred bytes or so, so I'm guessing the rest is interrupt handling and OS interfacing.

The hardest part of interfacing a faster CPU to an a500 as near as I can tell would be the core and IO voltages for the CPU. As for the PPC I have had _no_ experience with that apart from using the computers at uni.

My idea for 'upgrading' a 68k is much more evil and still uses the original 68k, roms, a high speed microcontroller and some tristatable buffers. If you want to know more, say so and I'll spawn another thread.

I considered the CDTV rom too for its fs drivers. Never got further than that.
Extra ROMs? Wow, they really did cheat.

Oh yeah. Like I said, rusty on 68k theory of operation. Been ages and that was hust for altering features on apps for my palm that irritated me. So, it does have an interrupt for illegal opcodes, right? Has anyone made a small patch already that takes advantage of that yet...or does the OS fill in the blanks for the missing opcodes on the more lowly CPUs?

[Azryl]

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

did you get the latest driver from this site?

also the lucas/frances accelerator project might be of interest to you

http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/amiga/hardware/accelerators/

[Generale]

Those are the drivers/schematic I'm using. Thanks for that though.
I'll have a look at the accelerator project in a min.

Oh, would this be right for the mountlist entry?

CD0: Handler   = L:BABELCDROMFS
     Startup   = ide.device/2
     StackSize = 4000
     Priority  = 10
     GlobVec   = -1

The 'Startup' line bothers me. Would it be /1 or /2 (slave on controller)..More to the point, is this a standard syntax used to specify the unit number?

[bloodline]

My idea for 'upgrading' a 68k is much more evil and still uses the original 68k, roms, a high speed microcontroller and some tristatable buffers. If you want to know more, say so and I'll spawn another thread.
 

Yeah, I'm interested... Spawn please :-)

[Stedy]

@Generale:

I have the Schematics for the Lucas board in Gif format if you need them.

They are available here: http://www.ianstedman.co.uk/Downloads/68020-68881.gif
http://www.ianstedman.co.uk/Downloads/Pals_&_Glue.gif

You would need to replace the obsolete 16L8 GAL devices, luckily the PLD source code is included.