Uncreative Labs

Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 66

Guys/Gals,

I don't want to pull traffic away from here, but this is something you should know about. Over at vintage-computer.com there has been a project to build new IDE controllers for the 8 bit PC and XT bus. Here is a link to the thread:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?t=12359

Long story short .. the first prototypes have been built and they are working. I just booted from a 40GB Western Digital IDE drive in an XT, and I'm running tests against it now.

If you are worried about your old drives, here is a great project. There are still revisions and updates to do, but it is looking very promising.

Mike

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

What's the target price?

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

I would be interested but likely would have to swap something VIVTAGE for the controller
It likely will cost $15-20
I DO have a good supply of older ide drives below 528 megs.
I have some refurbed IBM PC motherboards,
Not just tested but with a tag from a repair shop.

Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 6:33 am

put me down for 2 of these suckers....

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

I think you will need LBA drives so 500MB and up will work. Pretty sure the price will be double what was listed when all is said and done (unless it is a kit).

Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 9:49 pm

Please let us know where to acquire these when they are done, even as a kit form. i can whip out my soldering iron for a few hours of fun. Especially if i will be able to run an IDE HDD in an XT-Class machine

Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 66

I am a minor contributor to the project, so I'm not going to speculate about pricing. More than $50 and less than $100 is the ballpark.

Right now we're debugging the first run of boards and the BIOS. The BIOS bugs can be fixed, and the board looks to be stable enough. After we test with a pretty wide variety of drives then we can talk about end user orders.

The performance is not the greatest because we are not using DMA - DMA would complicate the design of the board because the PC and XT can't do DMA using 16 bit quantities. I've measured around 80KB/sec of throughput on reads and writes, so it is more than acceptable.

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 1:44 am

80kb/s is just fine, just something that can boot, format, read and write to it. is adequate. Any idea on how we will be able to program the drive type or format the suckers? Will we have to do a Debug routine or will there be a bios call upon startup?

Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 66

It auto-senses the drive parameters and does the LBA translation automatically.

The 40GB drive that I used had DOS 7 on it. My XT booted from it on the first shot - no mucking around.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

mbbrutman wrote:

The 40GB drive that I used had DOS 7 on it. My XT booted from it on the first shot - no mucking around.

Count me in for one card,

a question though...

What brand/version of dos 7 works on an XT and allows fat32 access so the 40gb drive will operate?

And where can I download it?

Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 3:09 am

freedos should do just that, not sure if it will run on an xp or not though