Date : Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:27:21 +0100
From : Richard Gellman <splodge@...>
Subject: Re: KeyBoard, Winchester Hard Drive
If you're willing to put in a little soldering time, you can bodge one.
Basically, the Acorn SCSI interface (which connected the 1Mhz bus to the
Adaptec ACB4000 (or similiar) board, which in turn connected a SCSI
interface to a winchester drive) is actually made of out
extra-ordinarily low-level components. Essentially, its a group of logic
circuits that expand the 1Mhz Bus into a 50pin SCSI bus.
The circuit diagram is in the Acorn Winchester Disk Service Manual (see
The BBC Lives!). The components in total will probably (haven't
researched this one) comes to under a tenner.
Once this is built, you should be able to connect a SCSI drive [1] to
the business end, format [2] it, and away you go.
[1] There was discussing about SCSI drives and their suitability for the
BBC Micro. Not all will allow reformatting to 256 byte sectors. However,
since they are cheap enough to get (at the lower capacities anyway) from
ebay, its worth trying if you go down this route.
[2] The Acorn formatters may not want to deal with the hard drive in
question, given that a limited range of drives were made. In particular,
things like "2Gb" may scare it. You may have investigate formatting the
drive manually, i.e. a BASIC program and a large number of OSWORD calls.
Documentation is available for this.
This is the route I'm planning, when I can get the components to make
the board. I have a 500Mb SCSI HD, and I'm going to use it :)
-- Richard
Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
>>Is the Winchester Hard Drive the only hard drive that
>>can be used? Are they available anywhere? What price??
>>
>>
>
>A Winchester *is* a hard drive.
>
>There are three type of Hard Drive storage available for
>the BBC. The original Acorn SCSI interface, which is now
>rather hard to get hold of. My replacement IDE interface
>that will let you use almost any cheap off-the-shelf IDE
>storage device. John Kotink's GoMMC interface which uses
>an MMC ramcard.
>
>See http://www.mdfs.net/Info/Comp/BBC/HardDrive
>
>
>