Henry wrote:
I am willing to lend one of my Vulcan set-ups for this endeavor, plus pay for the firmware, and then make the updated firmware freely available to the Apple retro community. Are there any takers/suggestions on this idea?David Wilson? As far as a Firmware guy, he's pretty good. Probably just needs the tables changed. A few bytes here and there would probably be enough to let 32, 64, 128 and 256 MB CF Cards work.Any comments David? I have a Controller, CF Adapter and CF Card to loan if you'd like to take a look?I know there'd be a few people who'd like that upgrade.
Good luck with the Vulcan firmware... It was written by none other than Bob Sander-Cederlof, and is quite interesting, IIRC. It did programmed I/O relatively quickly by aggressive loop unrolling. I took a look at it in the 1980s, and was surprised at its complexity and bank switching. I wouldn't be surprised if the drive constants were embodied in the code, and not just in tables--particularly if the details of the drive interface (8-bit/16-bit) changed. The Vulcan was designed just before IDE drives began to be "self- describing", so it's not very adaptable to drive types. -michael NadaNet file server for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."