Community driven IDE controller for Apple II?

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Community driven IDE controller for Apple II?

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the XTIDE project driven by the Vintage Computer forum community. It's basically an interface to connect modern hard disks to 8-bit ISA. They've actually managed to push the price of the card and components pretty low, taken that you assemble it by yourself.

I've been wondering whether something similar could be achieved by this community. There has been talks of developing a similar interface over at the Vintage Computer forum here.

I also found this project by Stephane Guillard.

Would it be possible or worthwhile to work on Stephane's design and develop it into a PCB, which could be then manufactured and people could assemble the card themselves?

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Re: Community driven IDE controller for Apple II?

As with the XTIDE, the hardest thing is the firmware.
Maybe even more so as this firmware has to be at least ProDos and GS OS compatible (Smartport).
DOS 3.3, Pascale and CP/M are there as well... its really more like a big software project.
Maybe that is the reason that you will get floppy emulation in most new cards as well, since the software already takes a lot of work.

The few TTL ICs and a EPROM are not really that complicated Wink

-Jonas

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