Description
This board is designed to work in the proprietary ISA slot for the Tandy 1400, it may work in other machines, but the physical size of the card is specifically tailored for the Tandy 1400. It will use an ATA-2 CompactFlash card in the place of an IDE hard drive which will allow you to easily remove the card and place it in a modern PC to move files back and forth.
Compact Flash cards are also not without their perils. Many cards we have found which claim ATA-2 compatibility are not fully compatible. This tends to be the case with lower end cards. We like SanDisk Ultra / Ultra 2. We generally use 2gb or 4gb cards, but larger or smaller can be used. Any ATA-2 compliant card should work, but be aware that some experimentation may be necessary. DOS 5.0 or 6.22 are probably best, as you can support a full 2GB FAT16 partition. Only use your target PC to format the card. Windows may, or may not configure the partitions correctly. Of course, you may run other operating systems as well, but create the partition via the OS setup. If for some reason your machine does not boot after FDISK and Format, run “FDISK/mbr” to reset the boot sector. This often fixes a hang at boot-time.
This board is programmatically identical to the Lo-Tech XT-CF-lite and is therefore powered by the XT-IDE Universal BIOS, provided through an in-system re-programmable 32KB (addressable) flash-based ROM. Since the BIOS is only 8KB, 24KB is available for other purposes, and is byte-programmable.
Lo-tech reference pages: blog entry and wiki page.
The ROM on this card is provided by the XT-IDE Universal BIOS via GNU GPL v2.
You may also want to check out the SanDisk Ultra II CompactFlash Card.
