+3e simple ide interface
Hi guys,
I want to make a +3e with my +2a. I'm thinking of making the simple 8bit ide interface (internal) and connecting it to a 40 pin ide to sd reader (see eBay link below) with a 2 gig sd card.
Having little knowledge about doing this I am assuming 2 things, firstly that my plan is feasible, and second that the card reader will draw the power it needs from the 5v line fed to it be the interface I will build
As above.
What do you think, am I on the right lines?
http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/390947545185?nav=SEARCH
I want to make a +3e with my +2a. I'm thinking of making the simple 8bit ide interface (internal) and connecting it to a 40 pin ide to sd reader (see eBay link below) with a 2 gig sd card.
Having little knowledge about doing this I am assuming 2 things, firstly that my plan is feasible, and second that the card reader will draw the power it needs from the 5v line fed to it be the interface I will build
As above.
What do you think, am I on the right lines?
http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/390947545185?nav=SEARCH
Post edited by Lost on
Comments
Yup! :)
It's a shame Zetr0 has vanished cause he was selling internal simple 8-bit interfaces on nice professionally made PCBs for a very reasonable price :)
The only concern I would have is whether the SD hard disk emulator thingy will work properly with the speccy. It's not something I have tried and I don't recall anyone on WoS ever doing it before (or at least reporting that they had) successfully.
I can understand wanting to get away from compact flash as they aren't common any more, which is a shame as they have the advantage that you can just solder a CF socket right to your interface with no extra components :)
He still is, just on Amibay :) Got one of his last batch on its way to me, and I seem to remember there might be a fresh batch shortly.
B
zx-diagnostics - Fixing ZX Spectrums in the 21st Century (wiki)
Sinclair FAQ Wiki
^ What he said... I've got one on the way too. He had 4 going, all taken now but he did suggest a fresh batch in the new year.
Thanks guys I Will try to build my own and see how I get on.
Am I right in thinking no tap loading is not possible with the simple interface?
Well it has no onboard RAM and ROM to run software from like a divide etc. The +3e ROM has no code to load tap files but it's not impossible to do with the interface.
It would be possible to load a tap from a drive with a simple 8-bit interface using the spectranet tap loader for example if only someone would get off their backside and finish writing their hard disk filesystem driver for it ;)
Well I started it a couple of years ago, and it's still not finished... ;)
"working on it" might be a bit of a stretch though :)
I have a more or less complete IDEDOS implementation and API that can read and write data on hard disk connected with a variety of interfaces (simple 8-bit, simple 16-bit, divide), and a partitioning utility that supports initializing drives, and creating and deleting partitions (other features are planned but those were the important ones).
Where the project has ground to a halt is implementing filesystem drivers... I started with +3DOS since that's the easiest to test by just booting into the +3e ROMs, but beyond formatting the partition and reading filenames from the directory I haven't got far. Turns out that implementing then testing complicated functions when you don't get any visible change in output is pretty tedious stuff :D
I'm a bit of a weirdo who quite enjoys writing utility code, but eventually got beaten by what a pita getting file sizes from CP/M directories is so the project has been pretty well stalled for a long while. Punctuated by occasional burst of enthusiasm where I work on it for a week and then ignore it again for three months when I come to the conclusion I'm doing it wrong and everything needs restructuring :lol:
The code that I have finished I'm fairly proud of... The first time I created a blank partition table and was able to add a hard disk partition and format it +3DOS from a 48k speccy I was pretty pleased with myself ;)
It looks quite complex to get files from the pc to the formatted card. That will be the next challenge. :o
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/BackToThePlus3/
If I had a +2B, I think instead of hacking it about internally to add an FDC I'd build a "clone" of the Amstrad SI-1, the external FDC interface that never was :)
I've never understood the reason for all that extra complexity with the BPROM and logic chips to emulate the data separator. I suppose in the days before eBay the real ones were harder to find perhaps?
It seems that getting files from my pc to the 8 bit interface will be a bit of a challenge.
Wonder if I should have gone 16 bit. :o
You have basically the same difficulty whether it's an 8 or 16 bit interface. You have to use a utility to copy files from a PC to the +3DOS partition on an IDEDOS formatted drive because it's something that your PC operating system has no idea of. Given that there's really no difference in difficulty providing the utility supports both 8 and 16 bit word transfers...
You should petition mcleod_ideafix to finish implementing 8 bit word support properly in his 3e utility if he hasn't done it yet ;)
LOL, actually, I have been away from the community for a while, sadly I was quite poorly and had way to much commitments to finish off before I got back into things.
I also noted that I am a bit of a sausage as my gmail / chat settings have changed to offline - and there was me thinking you were avoiding me and my strange requests ;)
I humbly salute you sir! its a lot of fun (and a bit of work) to develop your own internal 8bit IDE interface =)
Here was my first crack at it
Here was my third attempt to tidy it all up
Pretty isn't she ;)
The latest revision has jumpers to select PPROM or +3E ROM operation, thus if one wanted too you could use this with Pera's PPROM on the earlier 128k and 48k machines (if you can get the latter to fit ;) )
Quite pretty indeed =)
I also spent some time writing some software and user guides for the adaptor - I did share them on here, but sadly they didn't make "sticky" status which is a shame - but you can view a lot of the guides I made here and the software I wrote is free for personal use =)
That should get you going =)
Thank you - this is really helpful. I know it can be a challenge to get software onto this device, so your guides will be invaluable to me I'm sure.
Also, your interface looks the business!
I finally had time to attempt to build my 8 bit interface, here are some pictures of the project, not the neatest work you will every see. However I have managed to format a tiny (64meg) sd card and map a 16 meg partition to c:
I also saved a basic file for good measure, and was please to see it working
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8AEAM9VFI-NZk5IWjlGY0lNOWM/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8AEAM9VFI-NNG1ZcEhzYlNZS28/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8AEAM9VFI-NRlhDUVlPSTRMYkU/view?usp=sharing
The second one was a bit better even if it does look a bit... organic:
Are the components on yours just wired together on plain matrix board? Isn't that a bit... wobby? did you glue the sockets down or something first? :)
Cheers, i like your interface, it looks like something HR Giger would envision.
I superglued the idc socket and power socket. The rest, including the z80 socket is just held in plce by the soldered wires, however its not really wobbly because everything's pretty tight. The whole thing looks nice and stable once in.
- UPDATE: I have now managed to create a copy of my drive on the PC and load its contents into fuse. Now I just need to get traffic going in the other direction!!
It's not fitted yet though. Might be a drunken job for later! :lol:
So far so good. I loaded the hdf drive in fuse an could see the basic file I had saved there. However thats when things went down hill. I wanted to use StrowSaw to add new files to my hdf, but strowsaw does not like my file and cannot read or write to it. I have opened other hdf files like gary's software file and the one Zerot pointed to and they both worked fine in strowsaw.
So what I tried next seemed to work. I used fuse to copy files from zerot and Gary's hdfs to my hdf image. This took a while but seemed to work ok. I mounted there drives as slave and mine as master and then did something like:
copy "D:*.*" to "C:"
then I used drimg107 to copy that back to the my SD card.
I loaded this up in the speccy, and typed cat, the speccy only saw the basic file I saved first of all, not the new files. I hit reset and tried again and this time "cat" listed everything.
However, sometimes when I switch on the speccy it doesn't see the new files and some times it does. Also, most of the files seem to load and work ok, including the screens demo and the idetest. However I am struggling to get games to load. I move a z80 file i made in fuse on to the drive. Loading them in emulation works fine, however the file crashes pre loading screen on real hardware. Also zero's game files all seem to work fine using fuse, but it seems like many wont load and play on my spectrum.
At the moment I feel like I have a lot of success, but also many bothersome problems. Does anyone have any advice about how I can improve reliability?
As for the strowsaw not reading your file, make sure you check the "HDF 256" option on DRIMG. Althou, if you can see the files you copied on Fuse I would say the format of the HDF is fine...
Perhaps it has to do with using a SD card?...I've always used the 8 bit IDE interface with CF cards
I'm pretty sure it will be a case of being in a format 3e doesn't like
Please take a look, sir:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8AEAM9VFI-NQkJSRk1Xa000XzQ/view?usp=sharing