Re: Problem with Universal Disk Controller

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

steve.howell@altium.com.au wrote:
> It plugs up ok - even polls a few times - but im not sure if the
> firmware of the card is expecting a hard disk sector to respond.

You may have done some electrical violence to the drive and/or
controller.  This controller was not designed to attach such a drive,
which was very specific to the early Mac.

That's why it's valuable to early Mac users, but just "hardware" to
anyone else.

> A shame really - it would have been interesting. I expect I wont be
> selling this unit, but more carefully taking it apart to take another
> snap shot at what apple was designing with this sort of technology
> back in 1985, and poping it up on my webpage - maybe even extracting a
> bit of info to get any aspects of it into the FPGA domain. This
> particular design is loaded with a lot of European devices (including
> a Rodime hard disk, whom, mr rodime, the lucky bugga, now lives off
> royalities for the HD technology almost exclusively) - so with all
> these euro bits, it really looks like a corke project.
>
> Beautifully made, as was all of apples stuff of that era.
>
> steve
>
>
>
> > I would not even attempt it. An HD20 is worth a lot to the right Mac
> > crowd. You can probably get enough money out of it to cover one of the
> > variety of other mass storage solutions available today (CF, Focus,
> > SCSI, etc.)

-michael

******** Note new website URL ********

NadaNet and AppleCrate II for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."