ST-IDE-ROM Dev Board v1 - BETA Testers

[exxos]

BTW - The code hasn't even been tested this mod yet.. So the firmware might not actually be correct..

I'm building this circuit up on breadboard, with the MOSFETs I ordered the other day just to see what happens..

[PhilC]

I had the same issue recently with my ROM programmer and the PLCC to DIL adapters. The connections from the DIL pins have 2 pins wired to NC pins on the PLCC socket!

You need a couple of bodge wires to connect the PLCC socket pins together:

PLCC pins 12 and 13 need connecting together and pins 33 and 34 need connecting.

Once I made these changes I was able to program 27c4096 PLCC chips.

Thanks Kodak, that was exactly what the problem was. All working great now.

[rubber_jonnie]

I had the same issue recently with my ROM programmer and the PLCC to DIL adapters. The connections from the DIL pins have 2 pins wired to NC pins on the PLCC socket!

You need a couple of bodge wires to connect the PLCC socket pins together:

PLCC pins 12 and 13 need connecting together and pins 33 and 34 need connecting.

Once I made these changes I was able to program 27c4096 PLCC chips.

Thanks Kodak, that was exactly what the problem was. All working great now.

I'll also try this. Got my 1.04/2.06 ROM today and will look at getting the existing ROMs removed from my test board, or swapping to another, this weekend.

Going to have to wait on a few more parts to do the resistor/capacitor patch on the select1/2 jumpers though

[PaulJ]

Will download the test program in a mo but here's the requested photos

20190410_191746.jpg
20190410_191736.jpg

Device type is a Toshiba THNCF2G04QG 2.0GB, formatted to 4 partitions.

Phil, out of queriousity did you run the speed test?

[PhilC]

Which one Paul? I've run Gembench but that's not IDE related obviously.

[PaulJ]

Which one Paul? I've run Gembench but that's not IDE related obviously.

With the disk driver there is RateHD.prg that provides a bytes/sec transfer rate. With the ultasatan and ICD driver it comes with I get 896 K/s. On the falcon I get ~1690 K/s using ICD driver. I attribute the speed increase to 16 bit transfer vs a 8 bit for the ultrasatan.

I received the 245's yesterday and installed. Still waiting on IDE2SD adaptors. Should be here Monday.

[exxos]

I think the speed was about 1420kb/s , Icky probably remembers better... Though it is somewhat irrelevant anyway, as speed is determined by CPU transfer speed which is bottlenecked by RAM anyway. Speed of the interface is irrelevant as it is not much more than a address decoder.. Which runs at about 10ns decoding speed, or 100MHz.

You also cannot actually say the interface is fast or slow as it will quite easily run whatever speed the CPU and hard drive is capable of. This particular interface runs in just one bus cycle. So it is totally impossible to speed this up any more on the stock system.

In terms of accelerators, this is not tested, but it is also a little irrelevant. As while the accelerator may well access the hard drive at twice the speed for a theoretical 2840kb/s, it is still bottlenecked by ST-RAM. It is possible a small boost may be there, but likely not much, or nothing at all.

However I believe HD10 has a option to run the driver in alt-ram. So theoretically if there was alt-ram running at 16MHz with the CPU, then the IDE speed will of course double that over 8 MHz. But to my knowledge nobody has ever created a "fast ram" board for the STFM.. It is on my to do list among the other 500 things...

[PaulJ]

So, do you attribute the ~60% speed increase to software or hardware?

[exxos]

So, do you attribute the ~60% speed increase to software or hardware?

Where are you getting that 60% figure from ?

[PaulJ]

So, do you attribute the ~60% speed increase to software or hardware?

Where are you getting that 60% figure from ?

US with RateHD 896 K/s you/icky proto IDE with IDC drive ~1420 K/s = ~60% improvement.