anyone tried NVRAM simulation of hard drives

From: Michael Davidson <michael_davidson_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Sun Feb 2 12:12:00 2003

Doug Coward wrote:

>So now I'm thinking about how hard it would be to
>create a cartridge for say - the C64 that has a USB
>port and an EPROM on it. The EPROM would have routines
>that wedge into the Kernal disk routines on boot. (And
>of course they would bypassing the serial routines) Plus
>routines to translate disk commands to read and write
>files.
>
While USB sounds like a nice idea it would probably be
serious overkill.

More practical would be to add an IDE disk interface
which, with minimal work, could also interface to a
Compact Flash memory card. You wouldn't get hot-plug
capability but would probably do most of what you want.

Check out:

http://members.elysium.pl/ytm/html/ciaide.html

for various ideas on interfacing IDE devices to the C64

Note that, while a "real" IDE interface requires a 16 bit
data path (or, in the case of an 8 bit system, additional
latches to handle the upper 8 bits of data) it's only the
actual data register that is 16 bits wide, so you *can*
greatly simplify the interface if you don't mind wasting
half the capacity of your storage device (ie you only use
the low byte in the 16 bit data transfers). The downside
of this, apart from wasting 50% of the storage, is that
the data is stored in every other byte on the media making
interchange with other systems a problem.
Received on Sun Feb 02 2003 - 12:12:00 GMT

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