interface idea's

[alexh]

Exactly there are already several floppy disk emulators.

[simbo]

the max partition size in fat12 is 34MB before extenders {floppy creapes along and has a max of 720k without mods}

and no!!! this has not been done before !!!
ive seen these other projects and they just dont cut the mustard keeping most limits in place
and they cost a fortune
this board would cost about 20 euros or less


a few similar things have been made however they all leave the stupid slow controller there and limits of size
so are useless mostly

you two miss the point completely jookie doesnt....

atari tos partitioned hdd/satadisks ar not generic to windows
so cannot be read without using something like gemulator etc...
floppys also are decaying fast
also what you all overlook is the ability to have the card act as a buffer
you can then with a simple cable and using any usb card reader
connected both to the atari and pc
at the same time to the same card and dump files to the atari side .... or pc side
that can easily be copied to the hdd attached to the atari

this makes a whole heep of things possible
also the speed of transfer would be about the same as a satandisk or dma {1.4mbps }

1} throw the floppy drive the floppy disks and the controller in the bin for good
2} allows transfers to be made between pc and atari easily and hi speed so no disks to change
3} emulate floppy disks if you like that can be as large as 34mb !!!! so menus of games images
on a single sdcard can be used within a standard icon on the desktop
4} normal FAT partition so the card can be read easily by any pc with windows or mac's
5} a pc can write to it in a flash 34mb takes less that 1 second to write from the pc to the atari
and around 2 seconds for the atari to write to the card

im not surprised its the usualy bunch of people who throw dispair on any idea
just becouse they didnt have it themself's.. then someone makes it
this has happened three times now to ideas ive created and published

and no its not a lot of work to unplug a floppy drive and controller ic and plug in a board with a card mounted on it

most machines floppy controller is in a socket so no soldering is needed
and this free's some space inside the atari where its needed to add internal satandisk also

as for any adjustment to tos needed this is really easy i think about 50bytes to alter the floppy handler routines
+the icons changed bmp's
looking at tos 1.x code this is all that needs changed
actualy can just use jookies avr core to do it with just a few mods to the code

....

[dexterslab]

sorry simbo, didn't mean to offend

just think you need to think about what this does, which type of people might want it and when it would be of greater benefit over using satan/ultrasatan or an existing floppy emulator

i also think ditching the floppy drive and it's controller completly would be a bad idea... never burn your legacy bridges

[simbo]

i think if you have a floppy drive in a pc anyway and an sdfloppy in the atari
it makes no odds
becouse your burning nothing !!!

appart from some game original disks that use physicaly altered disks as there copy protection

change a few bytes then they dont

its fair game to alter these games now
as they arent supported and nolonger avalible to buy direct from writers

anything else isnt a problem

the wonderfull thing is you can just keep a 34mb sdcard as a backup image of crytical stuff

fine on not burning the bridge
however if you just unplug the board and plug the controller chip back in and connect the floppy again
you can go back to the past and tick tick tick away

so ... this issue is negated

next...!

however using flash nvram as a floppy would be one good solution
and this can also be written to easily using usb from the pc

again there is a problem solved becouse the image will still be physcial when you boot

something no other interface does

also using this system negates the floppy swap issue when using games etc that use two disks or more
that in someway i have found slows down the game play
if you dont have a drive B this is a problem cured for sure...

images of games are fine mostly .img and .st etc are cool
'most' games are patched to run this way anyway

the odd one is usualy the ones that are protected physicaly

atari low level software is 16 bit
i can patch ANY game protection in about 20 mins using w32dasm or ida pro

ive had tons of practice in the pc world and patch too many st/pc programs to remember

i can patch anything to run
guaranteed

when i started programming the first thing i learned was how to get around all there protections

i must have cracked and patched a couple of thousand programs for pc and early stuff
even cubase or other dongle stuff falls appart in ten mins ...

[simbo]

dont forget

this topic was opened to thrash out new ideas for use of later made tech

so im not insulted or bemused by adverse comments

and im happy your all post

atleast we then all know where things are
the worst thing is if knowone answers

this means its very good or very bad


adverse comments are i can assure you welcomed

[simbo]

the other crytical thing

people miss is our planets mag poles are about to swap

its been on the cards for 20,000 years and the time is soon im sure

so what happens to floppy and etc then ...??? who knows for definate

are you going to find one day your floppy simply wont read
as there data is scrambled in the poler shift process

it wont be long now

i think within 500 years...

[dexterslab]

ok, you seem to have thought about this a bit... could you incorporate more into it? esp given you have dma access, maybe that ide controller could be added at the same time... perfect for CF cards.

[simbo]

ok, you seem to have thought about this a bit... could you incorporate more into it? esp given you have dma access, maybe that ide controller could be added at the same time... perfect for CF cards.

yes
a second dma port is quite easy to add anyway in the form of a lun layer and controller enable
this would need bound at the low level drivers

its maintaining a fat profile is harder or large partitions .... that atari can use
that would present a problem

i think jookie should complete his ide devil project its the best one around for ide potentialy

[Jookie]

i think jookie should complete his ide devil project its the best one around for ide potentialy

Well, I like this IDE-to-DMA (ACSI) solution:
http://stlabs.free.fr/stdmaplus.html

Anyway, as the IDE (PATA) is dead and replaced by SATA, there is not much use for IDE interface in Atari (except CF cards, but that will disappear when they will not be made anymore, too).

[dexterslab]

i think jookie should complete his ide devil project its the best one around for ide potentialy

Well, I like this IDE-to-DMA (ACSI) solution:
http://stlabs.free.fr/stdmaplus.html

Anyway, as the IDE (PATA) is dead and replaced by SATA, there is not much use for IDE interface in Atari (except CF cards, but that will disappear when they will not be made anymore, too).

well dont forget sata is the same as pata, it's just it's in a serial form rarther than paralell. Very very easy to convert a sata disk back to pata... and also means you can create a pata interface and build on a sata converter. Many of the early sata hard disks worked like this, simply pata drives with a built in converter (any sata hard disk with a 4 pin molex power connector is really a pata drive)

CF will be around for a very very long time

[alexh]

Well, I like this IDE-to-DMA (ACSI) solution:
http://stlabs.free.fr/stdmaplus.html

Shame the software was never finished and it was never released.

Anyway, as the IDE (PATA) is dead and replaced by SATA, there is not much use for IDE interface in Atari (except CF cards, but that will disappear when they will not be made anymore, too).

Long term yes. Unfortunately the PHY technology used in SATA means that we wont be re-creating them in FPGA designs for a while as the chips with compatible phy's are too expensive.

[alexh]

well don't forget SATA is the same as PATA, it's just it's in a serial form rather than parallel.

Erm yeah, right... NOT (lot more complex than that)

Very very easy to convert a SATA disk back to PATA...

True, you can buy PATA->SATA adapters.

[simbo]

i think saying 'they will disappear soon becouse they are no longer made" is total and utter rubbish
jookie shame on you

thats like saying we dont need ataris anymore becouse they arent made
or usb 1 wont exist becouse its been replaced
or knowone will eat sneekers.. becouse there is a global shortage of marathons

there are billions of ide drives out there and zillions of cf and sdcards and relevent adapters
every week i find atleast 5 or 6 ide types free in the road and take them home
they are usualy full of mp3 that i take a copy of and give the drives to my pals or they go into my raid array..

i wipe.exe the drive platters using secure drive tools {i posted a link somewhere}
i also got a batch of 20 from ebay of smaller ide drives all working fine with little or no use made of them
to make avalible here....

jookie should finish his ide devil
as i like sometimes having a hard-disk wirring away
its just a pitty someone like HDDRIVER ure did'nt write into his drivers
some form of drive time keeper {its a no brainer really and one reason i dont buy it}

so it powers its self down after 5mins from access or something acc controlled
now this would be a good idea for us all as it saves them going dead from being powered all the time

if you dont want to finish it jookie ill do it m8 no problem
i just wont step on anyones toes.... ill get a look at the one you mentioned

there are also plenty of dual mode controllers made
that have both sata and pata interfaces in one chip

[dexterslab]

so it powers its self down after 5mins from access or something acc controlled
now this would be a good idea for us all as it saves them going dead from being powered all the time

when i bought hddriver v8 the other month i'm pretty sure there's an .acc included that does just that, it's not built into the driver though

[simbo]

hum ill check it out

if this is the case ill do something about getting a copy
as its one tool i would use for sure all the time...

[wongck]

every week i find atleast 5 or 6 ide types free in the road and take them home
they are usualy full of mp3 that i take a copy of and give the drives to my pals or they go into my raid array..

Picking up stuff like is a security risk. You may pick up a virus or two as well.

[wongck]

there are billions of ide drives out there and zillions of cf and sdcards and relevent adapters

Agreed. And if you are fast enough you can get plenty because ppl are scraping them every day.
The place where I work just scrapped 20+ P4 systems.
Plenty of good stuff in them (DDR, FDD, HDD), but I can't take them home else my engineers thinks that I into scrap metal

[Shredder11]

Blimey my Intel P4 640 3.2GHz ABIT AS8 based desktop is nearly five years old, yet it still feels new to me! I'm still using my Intel Celeron 1.2GHz ASUS TUSL2-C desktop for testing out Linux distros and booting into older versions of Windows. My two pocket computers are five and eighteen years old and still used all the time. Oh and not forgetting my beloved Atari STe machines which are older than time itself...

[simbo]

its better to keep older hardware
unless you need absolute to part with it
thats it
otherwise someone says its useless then it becomes that way through opinion
when i dont want noise from a hdd
i should be able via acc to turn the dam thing off
forinstance
load cubase from hdd
then turn it off and use another media for samples etc
then the hdd needs only power up to unload it or load it again

best keep older hardware as it gains value in £$E...etc


i changed the mpu in an oric computer the guy who is a very renound architect
payed me well to fit a 2mhz mpu
and i was happy to see it come alive

so was he

becouse this machine is a very easy basic programmed platform
he and his company depends on to display wire models
asteroid style

he uses the basic code and output to build 3d models easily

so reused this nice 8 bit machine

so nothing is old

it depends how you use it

im just sad to see someone call something hardware old
its probably older than them in this case

this is daft....

[simbo]

this whole set of topical posts is off the course including mine....
and we need to stick to adjendas only
stick to posts about what to add to an idea
not what to take away ....