Beer 202 IDE interface | MSX Resource Center (Page 5/7)

Par Alexandre_Taito

Champion (325)

15-03-2005, 20:10

I'll do that as soon as I finish some work-in-progress here.

Par tnt23

Master (148)

15-03-2005, 20:20

Alexandre, that would be great

Par jpgrobler

Master (154)

15-03-2005, 21:18

Great, JP! And it's nice to know that Egor is fine now.
But... Why do I feel my work was a waste of time? :/

No never!! I did not know if anything would come from Egor just because I have not heard from him for quite a while.

Developing together is better, I wouild like to see the interface bios expanded to handle LBA? newer hdd's as well. Fat 16 etc would be nice!

This opens up hdd for msx1 very cheaply and if a pcb could be found . . .
This makes me personally very happy!!

Par tnt23

Master (148)

16-03-2005, 08:31

Sorry for the offtopic, but what about 'Diamond Logic "SuperATA" IDE interface' -
http://msxfun.narod.ru/msx_hard/msx_ide1.html ?

Par adrcunha

Expert (117)

16-03-2005, 10:49

Interesting IDE, tnt32. 3 times faster than Beer 202, probably as fast as Sunrise IDE. DiskROM is BEER 202 based, same features (5 drives, same partitioning scheme, CHS only). Seems that Egor's HDPREP can be used for partitioning. I believe it's more complex (and expensive) than BEER to build due to the PLD, but the hardware guys can tell more about this issue.

Par LuizLeo

Supporter (6)

16-03-2005, 14:59

I'm very curious to know if this interface will work with Compact Flash IDE adapters. I was searching the Internet and the CF adapter is very easy to find on Ebay (Here in Brazil is not so easy) and simple to build one.

Due to the constant growth of digital camera resolution, there are a lot of used CF to sell with a good capacity (MB). 32 MB CF could be a very nice option to be used in a MSX.

Adriano told us that he got 52KB/s in his tests. I was thinking: If we use a Compact Flash (without any mechanical parts) would the transfer rate be better ?

Par tnt23

Master (148)

16-03-2005, 16:11

Adriano told us that he got 52KB/s in his tests. I was thinking: If we use a Compact Flash (without any mechanical parts) would the transfer rate be better ?

At least power consumption (and noise!) both should drop significantly :-)

Par dhau

Paragon (1570)

16-03-2005, 16:20

I think it depends on a type of CF. If it's one of the firstgen 16 or 32MB cards, I doubt it'll be faster. But if it's one of modern 60-speed cards (i.e. ~9MBytes/s) will beat the crap out of any old CHS-based IDE HDD. But at speeds indicated above I think the bottleneck is in interface, not in drive. So what will speedup I/O is CPU speed. Try installing Super Turbo mod with a decent Z80 (Z084C0020?) and clock it at 20MHz and see how speed goes up

Par adrcunha

Expert (117)

16-03-2005, 17:14

dhau is right. Probably even the slowest CHS HDD is still fast enough for decent transfer speeds on MSX. The bottleneck is really the CPU power: BEER has a cheap hardware, but the price you pay is less performance. I believe that even a modern CF card will not get higher transfer speeds with BEER but, anyway, I think 52K/s with such simple hardware on a MSX1 is great.

Par [D-Tail]

Ascended (8263)

16-03-2005, 17:54

The Sunrise ATA IDE doesn't get more than 300kB/s out of it...

However, MegaSCSI (expensive!) would get about 600 or 650kB/s... Or so I've heard. I think a lot of bottlenecks are there due to code issues.