Date   : Sat, 21 Jan 2006 22:54:54 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: eBay What is this?

Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
> I was after the bridge board more than anything, there's a real shortage
> of them round here

Yep, they're not *that* common - most of them ended up in either add-ons for 
home micros (and of course they were hugely expensive), or mid-range Unix 
workstations (which often came equipped with SCSI controllers, but used ST506 
drives to keep costs down)

 > and I was slightly intrigued by the possibility of the drive contents.

Sure - so am I! :-)

> It's the first bridge board I've seen on E-Bay apart from
> ones which will obviously be inside officially packaged BBC Winchesters 
> like Cumana or Technomatic ones.

Yep, not the sort of thing that people would sell separately I suppose. I 
think all of my loose ones were Torch ex-workshop spares; everywhere else I've 
only ever seen them with drives in an enclosure...

> A scan of the Xebec manual would be handy, or just the details of the
> initialise command (12, &C) parameters should get me going.

See Jon's post; seems like it's around on bitsavers already! :)  My manual's 
for revision E firmware (should be stamped on top of your board's EPROM) so 
it's got a supplement in the back of the manual that covers the changes 
between rev. D and E. Yell if that's what firmware you have and you think it 
may be useful.

Actually, my manual's for a S1410, not an S1410A - I'm not sure what the 
difference between the two is...

> I am not sure how I would get any data off the drive.  If anyone can point
> me to a programme or routine which will do it then I will see if I can get it
> copied onto some other media.

I'm sure it must be possible on the beeb somehow - once the drive geometry is 
set up the board should appear like a SCSI disk and a normal read command can 
be used to read raw sector data from the drive. *Hopefully* the SCSI code in 
the ADFS ROM is separate from the filing system code, so that there's a way to 
do a raw read from a device that doesn't have ADFS on it...

I've got some hardware thrown together to talk to one of these cards from a PC 
parallel port, but I haven't had time to write any software to drive it yet - 
hopefully soon!

cheers

Jules