TronDD wrote:I poked around with my Dual IDE card. I have the version with the GALs and had a hard time getting them programmed. Several programmers, a bunch of money, and a lot of hassle later, they seemed to program but I never trusted them. When the card didn't work, I was fed up with it and put it aside for over a year.
Taking a closer look now, I checked the output of the GALs. I'm not sure they are working correctly. GAL1, which does the address handling, seems to output regardless of the address. And GAL2 which handles the chip signals seems like it might be doing some of right thing except it never sends the chip enable signal to the 8255. So the 8255 is forever dead in the water.
I hated the GALs from the start and I no longer have access to a Windows system that the programmer software requires to check them or reprogram them. I'm just going to order the next version of the board that did away with the GALs and start over.
I'm so sorry to hear that! But I understand - When I saw that version with the GALs, I kind of thought the same thing. I was glad that John made the next version without them.
I probably should move onto the BIOS phase of this project. I'm sure the low-level functions work and are ready to be implemented into a BIOS. But I'm going through the IDEutil code thoroughly first.
Right now, I can read, write, format, backup and restore. I can copy one disk to another, or from the first 00-FF tracks to the "backup partition," which is really just the next set of contiguous 256 tracks. CP/M only sees the first 256 tracks, so the others can be used for backups.