[Video] Dual drop IDE adapter for the Falcon with optional byteswap

[Badwolf]

Afternoon all,

In the few minutes I have here and there at the moment, I've been playing with interoperability of my Falcon's 'hard disc' with modern machines.

This has led me to try various things from different drivers to having a dedicated second disc in byteswapped format. It's also led me on to playing with physical byteswapping and hard disc driver hacking. More on the latter anon, perhaps.

In the meantime, I've been having a play with a small adapter board:-





Cheers!

BW

[stephen_usher]

An in-line adapter board with internal register endian swapping woulddefinitely be the way to go, even better if it were small enough to be no higherthan the chunky original 2.5" drive, fit on the back of a more modern IDE drive in the bay and with a pass-through for a cable to take the IDE elsewhere in the case (or outside) for a second drive.

I must admit that I was surprised that the SD-CF adapter worked with your SDHD card though as SDHD isn't backwardly compatible with the original MMC/SD standard.

[Steve]

I honestly think the best way to get data on/off the Falcon is with a Netusbee, not the ethernet part, the usb stick part. It's very fast. I don't like messing around with hard disk drivers and partitions at the best of times.

[stephen_usher]

I must admit that I do use a NetUSBee, networking with UIPTool. Very convenient drag and drop using a web browser.

[Badwolf]

I don't have a NetUSBee, but I do have a Hydra & an EtherNEC.

AFAIK the ethernet side is basically the same throughout, them all.

Whilst it's not bad for the most part, sometimes larger files will simply stall or stop altogether and even if they work you still have to extract them on the 30 year old hardware. It's not really an IO port.

Popping the SD card in the Mac and tar-gm'ing straight onto drive F, or whatever, is a considerable advantage.

When working with Basilisk files (CD ROM images, in some cases) this would have been a big help!

BW

[Steve]

Yeah you want the USB functionality... not the Ethernet part to be honest (as you said, it can be flaky) The USB is rock solid and has actively developed drivers: https://www.perdrixapps.com/usb