Re: Upcoming project: virtual hard drive for //c and IIgs

[datajerk <datajerk@gmail.com>]

On Apr 26, 11:30 am, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Peltier Cedric wrote:
> >> There are plenty of examples out there showing how such a driver might
> >> be done for Linux.  Poke around for sio2pc (Atari) and Drivewire
> >> (Tandy CoCo).
>
> > Maybe a driver for the smartbus is possible under linux, but I don't
> > know if we could sample reliably a 250KHz serial line through even
> > modern PC I/O under a multitasking environnement (I will give it a try)
> > without a dedicated hardware. From my point of view, using such
> > dedicated hardware on a modern system look pointless for the task,
> > better to do a stand alone system from scratch interfacing the smartbus
> > to IDE or SD. I hope I exposed constraints clearly.
>
> I don't know enough about the smartbus protocol to speak authoritatively, but
> the parallel port hardware on more recent systems should be capable of 1Mhz.
> operation.  How tight are the timing margins?  Where can I find a timing
> diagram for the bus?
>
> If it could be done with a small amount of logic or FPGA, that would still be
> of interest to me.
>
> Steve

A Linux solution would be great.  That opens up the possibility for a
small embedded Linux system to be a //c HD.