Re: Options for IIc hard drive

[david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson)]

Ralph Glatt <mairsil@my-deja.com> writes:

>In article <B6516A2A.E6D2%sheppy@sheppyware.net>,
>  Eric Shepherd <sheppy@sheppyware.net> wrote:
>> in article 3a2be16a@news.svn.net, Paul Grammens at grammens@svn.net
>wrote on
>> 12/4/00 10:25 AM:
>>
>> > Be interesting to try and reverse-engineer that drive...
>>
>> Sure would.  A //c hard drive is sort of one of those quasi-mythical
>things
>> a goodly number of people would like to have, myself included.

>I have a 40 meg Sequential Systems hard drive for my //c. Neener neener
>neener! ;-) (Then again, your GS is probably outfitted with cards I can
>only dream about!)

No need to reverse engineer anything. The Smartport protocol (hw & sw) is
well documented. All you need is a small card with some logic to interface
to the Smartport bus (a CPLD should do the trick or an IWM chip as used in
the UniDisk 3.5 drive), a CPU (65c02 @ 2MHz would probably suffice but pick
whatever chip you want), some RAM and Flash for the code and finally a SCSI
controller chip if you want to interface SCSI disks to the //c or perhaps
some more logic to interface to IDE ATA/ATAPI drives would be better. The
most difficult parts to obtain would probably be the D19 plugs and sockets...
--
David Wilson  School of IT & CS, Uni of Wollongong, Australia