Disk hardware emulation, was Re: Grandfather system RTE6/VM?

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Mon Dec 8 20:03:53 2003

On Sun, 2003-12-07 at 08:27, Pete Turnbull wrote:

> So Tony's idea could handle everything including an LLF, for any format
> and any encoding scheme you like.

I agree also, Tony's most recent idea is probably the most robust over
all. And, satisfying both of our opinions, could be done in hardware, or
in software with a little hardware glue :-)


> > c) Something that works "with most ST506 drives" is, IMHO, not good
> > enough. If a drive works with the ST506 controller with which it was
> > formatted, it should work with the emulator.

But simulator an ST506 shoudl be straightforward enough today, since
it's all in the past, and configurable on the simulator side.

> You'll have a job to get a parallel port or any other standard
> interface to work fast enough to talk to the ST506 side. On the
> storage side, you could use anything you like -- make the software in
> the emulation system modular, and storage is just storage -- whether
> it's SCSI, ATA/IDE, network filestore, flash, whatever.

Parallel is dead. USB is the flavor of the month, and today easily used.
There are USB adapters that appear to be 16550/8250 serial ports from
the software side, for instance, but operate at USB speeds. I'm sure
there are other trivially adapted versions of this idea that will do USB
2.0.
Received on Mon Dec 08 2003 - 20:03:53 GMT