M8207 anyone?

From: ajp166 <ajp166_at_bellatlantic.net>
Date: Thu Aug 10 18:13:41 2000

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>


>> The later boards could possibly even be enough to fake the IDE
interface
>> directly. Even an old clunky 120mb WD2120 would seem large!
>
>Jerome Fine replies:
>
>Any ideas as to how the DRV11-J (M8049) might need to be programmed
>to interface to an IDE drive? Any could that become a device driver?


Some but it's too involved to talk about without drawing pictures.
Suffice to say IDE is not a protocal like SCSI it is a DEVICE
interface and is somewhat uncooked at that. It happens the devices
on the other side are fairly intelligent and thats an aid to the driver.

First off the driver would have to be written.

>I have heard that there is a possibility of using an IDE as the disk
drive
>behind a controller that would be able to use the HD(X).SYS device
>driver that John Wilson makes use of in the E11 emulation software.


??? I dont work with emulators so none of that is of any meaning to me.

>In addition, it has been suggested that even a SCSI drive might be OK
>as well. What might be involved in producing such an animal? While


SCSI is non trivial to do and also the driver can be a pain.

>HD(X).SYS is far too simple a concept to use in an OS that requires
>multi-tasking, like RSX, for RT-11 it seems like the perfect solution.
>Unfortunately, I have so little hardware knowledge that I do not know
>even what questions should be asked.


Actually a simple driver can work if it's reentrant. However, while
RT-11
is fairly simple to write drivers for the other OSs it definately more
work
as the driver has error recovery and other diagnostice code burried in
it.

Unix hwoever is a different case as a driver for something like RL02
might be easily bent to work with IDE.

Allison
Received on Thu Aug 10 2000 - 18:13:41 BST

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