connecting a PC as an ide device on amiga

[Jeek Elemental]

Wondering if this has been done, googling it is hard because of noise.

Basically, having a pc running an IDE emulator, serving for ex. a single directory.
Amiga side see this as a normal IDE hd, so that support is built in (with >3.0 kickstart I guess).

Anyone heard of something like this or similar?

[Thomas]

Du such emulators exist? This would need to be some special hardware. A normal IDE controller would not do it. IDE is hirarchical. There is one controller and two devices. A controller cannot be (mis)used as a device on another controller. One would need to put an IDE connector and the device firmware on a PCI card. Would probably be very expensive because it's not often demanded.

You can do this with SCSI. SCSI allows multiple host adapters on one bus. This can be used for networking or device sharing.

[persia]

IDE is dead anyway.  Just mount it as a network drive.

[Jeek Elemental]

just to clarify, the point is for the amiga to only see a normal ide hd, bootable without any special drivers.
The pc end could be a variety of connections I guess, any that is able to supply the required IDE signals.

Thomas mentions SCSI, thats very interesting. Anyone tried this and is it bootable from rom? Ie linux pc with scsi card<------>scsi card attached to amiga.

[Tension]

just to clarify, the point is for the amiga to only see a normal ide hd, bootable without any special drivers.
The pc end could be a variety of connections I guess, any that is able to supply the required IDE signals.

Thomas mentions SCSI, thats very interesting. Anyone tried this and is it bootable from rom? Ie linux pc with scsi card<------>scsi card attached to amiga.

I have a SCSI chain which consists of:

PowerMac <----> SCSI Disks <----> Sampler

The devices can both use the SCSI disks, and the Mac can control the Sampler, so in theory your idea is technically possible.  All you'd need would be the software.

[GrizzlyAdams]

There are IDE CD/DVD emulators that are harddrive backed, and connect to a host pc for downloading the iso to the harddrive, thats about the closest thing I know of.  That type of thing was used for the Xbox 1 development units.  The Chihiro arcade units (an arcade board based off an xbox motherboard) used a maskrom disk that attached via IDE as well.

I guess you could do something similar to the HxC USB version, just change the interface to IDE (which should be a little bit simpler than floppy emulation, because seek commands on a harddrive have status codes that indicate when the data is ready for reading from the buffer). It would still require quite a bit of changes to the VHDL/Verilog sources for the chip.

I'm not sure if they even exist, but a iSCSI hba that plugs in asif it were a drive would be another option assuming you had a scsi controller in your amiga.

[jsixis]

many many years ago my wife and I did have a network between the Amiga and PC where you could actually see the hardrives. The Amiga's slow buss speed was the limit.
 Why re invent the wheel when what you want is already possible.

 PC was running windows 98 we used Clonato Amiga Forever 2.0 to do it.
 I may set it back up if for no other reason I would have a working & reliable floppy drive, USB access & a hardrive larger then 4gb (like I need that)

 ohh, bootable would be a problem

[persia]

You can't net boot an Amiga?

[GrizzlyAdams]

I think you can netboot, some zorro network cards had a "boot rom option" listed.
No idea what the server requirements are, never heard of anyone doing it.

[motrucker]

Didn't the original Siamese do this, sort of?