Date   : Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:01:15 +0000
From   : Fragula <fragula@...>
Subject: SASI/SCSI <>IDE, distracting thoughts.

Howdy Phil!

>>
>>Elegant indeed. Worthy of a good airing!
> 
> So, this weekend I was sufficiently enthused by this idea to sketch a
> schematic for it.  Turns out to be pretty simple, just a microcontroller
> and a pile of buffers really:

Indeedy. And something if, played right (i.e. with jumpers in the right
places) with a much wider application than I'd originally thought.

Possibly someone might want to do a commercial run.

SCSI drives (with 50 way IDE connectors, as opposed to U160/U320) are
getting harder to find these days, and there are lots of other folk out
there flogging their own flavour of dead horse. (Sun, Apple, SGI etc.) a
few quick jumper swaps, a quick flash, and its for something else.

Random things that popped into my head:

It probably would't be to (for a BBC-only variant) hard to scrap the
"SCSI" side altogether, and just interface (address decoding and a
buffer or latch) the AVR direct to the 1MHz bus, no? Much narrower
application tho. Still looks like the same thing as far as ADFS is
concerned, just removes the requirement for a 1MHz adaptor board, which
probably a lot of people don't have.

Build, Two contraditory ideas.

My guess is they don't do an AVR in a .1" DIP, otherways, this would be
a nice thing to make a kit from, the rest of it is almost screaming for
wirewrap, veroboard, vialess PCB etc. Sweet for the (typical at my
guess) BBC Bodger.

OTOH SMDing the rest on a tight PCB could make it a "back of drive"
adaptor, giving it a wide appeal to the older computer user. (i mean
user of older computers, of course..:-)

Cheers!

M.