Re: Harddisk for the Atari ST
- From: "techie_alison" <retro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2006 19:35:45 +0000 (UTC)
"techie_alison" <retro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dqe74h$4t$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> "Uwe Seimet" <Uwe.Seimet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:42vduoF1l5hjjU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > techie_alison wrote:
> >
> > > a little more involved. The one I'm stuck on at the moment with
> standard
> > > ACSI (not hosted SCSI Uwe) is how the drive size and specs are
> determined,
> >
> > Remember what I (I think) I mentioned about determining the size of
> > drives connected to the ACSI bus: The hard disk driver will take care of
> > this, and it is not the concern of the ACSI-related hardware to
> > provide any special functions for this.
> > All you have to do is implement the ACSI/SCSI command set, anything else
> > will be handled by the hard disk drivers.
> >
> > --
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Dr. Uwe Seimet http://www.linkbylink.net/
>
> Yes but there is no ACSI command for determining drive size. Let's assume
> that we're not going to be using your drivers for a moment, so no SCSI
> support, just a plain old RLL on the end of the controller running with
> Atari's bog standard implementation. Bug free or not it can still
determine
> the size of that drive when there is no documented
> electrical-sequence-of-1's-and-0s to do it.
>
> I can't implement a 3rd party hardware solution if the computer throws
> something at it and it doesn't repond correctly. With most of these
> hardware things alot of it is trial and error as manufacturers will fall
> back on their drivers at every turn. ie, Implementing a wireless solution
> with the custom chips out there has to be one of the hardest things to do
as
> the manufacturers insist that you pay extorniate investment fees to their
> name, and then the documentation you receive is non-existant, read the
> sci.electronics groups. The corporate market is not open and is highly
> protective of it's internal interfacing and source code. If I was a
> gigantic manufacturer I'd have paid Atari £250,000 for detailed hardware
> documentation and would have finished this 3 months ago.
>
> It's a bit like putting a teenage driver in a car with no wheels on it.
>
> I'm at the point now where I just couldn't care less after banging my head
> against a wall, hence, no interface. If it's that simple then I'd be
> grateful if someone else would do it and I'll pay them £50 for a little
> retail box which requires no soldering, programming of GAL chips and
> fiddling about. Just something which plugs into that ACSI port and gives
me
> mass storage without third party drivers and specialist hacks.
>
> I have no enthusiasm to do this anymore when all that ends up is argument
> without facts.
>
>
To add to this, <calms down>, if the Atari drivers issue a command of '1'
for example, then I have to tell my interface what to do. It's more that
for each of the ACSI/SCSI commands I have to 'interface' these to whatever
mass storage device is on the other end. So I need to know EXACTLY what
data and commands are going back and forth, and I have to entirely
understand those commands explicitly. If I can't calculate every possible
eventuality or possible blip then the interface will be unreliable with some
byte at some point amongst billions of transferred bytes. This is not
acceptable.
.
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- Re: Harddisk for the Atari ST
- From: techie_alison
- Re: Harddisk for the Atari ST
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- Harddisk for the Atari ST
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