*** M E M O R U M ***

I note with considerable interest the Compact Flash storage that Martin is developing for the MTX http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/m ... fx/cfx.htm. It looks very interesting. I wonder whether it would also support interfacing to PATA hard disks, as I believe that the interface is essentially the same.

I had also been idly wondering about a cheaper alternative to Andy's REMEMOrizer. Two alternatives had occurred to me:

* One was simply bit-bashing the SPI interface to an SD card.
* More recently, I have been playing with a Parallax Propeller chip, in the form of the Propeller HAT for the RaspberryPi. The Propeller chip is also available in 40 pin DIP format, and is capable of both interfacing to SD cards, and producing VGA output.

But then my ideas were just idle dreaming, while Martin has done something about it. Good on you.

The interface is a 16 bit IDE implementation, with the CF sitting on a small adaptor board that Dave sourced from China via E-bay.

In theory it should support PATA hard drives, and optical drives if the ATAPI control software were written.

I have some read only Fat32 code that ought to work with hard drives of up to 8 gig (it's using 24 bit sector addressing) but it's only been tested on CF cards.

Read/write is turning out to be a lot more complicated than I expected. Gigabytes of drive space and 8 bit processors are an ugly mix.

With a suitable SATA to PATA adaptor there's no reason a modern serial device couldn't be fitted, 48bit IDE is just an extension of the older 28 bit standard.

Although I'll leave writing the software to access terabyte sized NTFS or EXT2/3/4 partitions to someone else!

So does that mean I won't be able to connect up and use my 4T byte HDD with a certain film (featuring a lovely woman and an MTX) and play the movie on my lovely MTX?

Mark