Hallo allemaal, I just finished the HW of the interface to connect a IDE-harddisk with a C64. Now the testing phase starts. FYI, it is built with 7 common available ICs. As base of the design served the idea of John, the SCH of an interface for a XT-PC, one for the TRS-80 COCO and one I got from our sister organisation, the Sinclair User Group. Their design was completely different but that helped me to solve some questions I still had. The next problem is: what to do with the whole thing? It sounds great to have a HD attached to your C64 but I'm going to ask you the same question that silenced a colegue at my office: what about the needed SW???? I think I can free up to 2KB in the original ROMs by removing the cassette- and RS232-software but I'm sure that won't do. You could add extra ROM using some HW-tricks but I wonder what happens with the compatibility towards an original system. Another solution is to use a C64 as Server. You can use a cartridge to load the actual server-SW and from that time on the C64 functions as another HD. Only disadvantage: not 1541 compatible. ************ = Big Idea !!!! :-) My third idea was to use an obselete 1541 or 1571 board as base. Add the above HW and change the ROM where needed. The idea is to change the ROM there where it starts to read the data from/ write to the disk. In this way (I hope) speeders like EXOS V3 and even SPEEDDOS still will run. I even hope GEOS won't notice the difference. The Big Idea that popped up writing the description of the C64-Server is to add some RAM to the board and to use this for the actual HD-software. In this way you can change the SW without the need to burn EPROMs every time. So my first question to you is to give your opion about the 3 ideas and feel free to add even more! If there is a first question, there should be at least a second. What about the format of the disk itself? One idea is to create a lot of D64-images but that would mean that a 3.5 MB HD would be sufficient to give you 20 1541-floppies. But before inventing the wheel again, who has some ideas? (BTW, does anybody know how CMD solved this?) Groetjes, Ruud - This message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list. To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe | mail cbm-hackers-request@dot.tcm.hut.fi.
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