[Coco] Just another peek...

[Mark McDougall]

On 10/10/2015 7:32 AM, Dave Philipsen wrote:

> My guess is that we'll have the DE1 booting from the SD card in fairly
> short order but it could be some months as I have not found any other
> volunteers as of yet to help on the coding and my time is a little
> stretched right now.

My $0.02 worth...

You're really going about this ass-backwards and creating more mess and 
confusion along the way. We don't NEED more media support in software, 
it's only going to muddy the already muddy waters.

You should be looking at making the FPGA do the heavy lifting via 
hardware emulation. My Coco 1/2 implements the 'standard' Cloud9 IDE 
interface via the opencores OCIDE controller core. That interfaces 
directly to a CF card, for example. I've got read support working on the 
SD card - not via any convoluted driver quasi hardware setup - but via a 
back-end interface that make the SD card look/act like disk media on the 
back end of an IDE controller. Not 1 byte of additional software/ROM 
required.

The coco is already confusing with FD-50X, Super/GlensideIDE, Drivewire 
and CocoSDC hardware. Add DECB, (Nitr)OS9, HDBOS and Drivewire software, 
and it's becoming unmanageable. Now you want to add SD card support in 
software as well, across DECB and NitrOS9? That's just nuts!

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall              | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"