Description
This card will allow a compact flash card to be used as a hard drive in an IBM XT or compatible machine. It will also work with ATA-2 compliant hard drives and with SD cards via an FC1306T adapter. IDE drives were released to the market well after the days of the IBM XT and natively supports 16-bit data transfers. As a result, the 8-bit bus of the IBM XT will not allow an IDE controller to function natively. This card will cut the data in half and send it one byte at a time to the bus instead of two like a native IDE controller. This card also uses the XT-IDE Universal BIOS to provide a BIOS extension to allow older machines to speak to Compact Flash / ATA-2 compliant devices.
While this card will work in virtually any PC with an ISA slot, it is primarily intended for PCs which do not, or cannot support IDE and have a smaller data bus such as the IBM XT or clones. For best performance, you should try to get at least a 16-bit interface for your PC if it supports one. If you wish to use it a newer machine anyway, this card should work so long as your PC supports BIOS extensions. One advantage is that there is no 504mb limitation, or any other legacy limitation (other than what the OS imposes) on using larger volumes. This support is provided by the XT-IDE Universal BIOS.
XT-IDE Universal BIOS via GNU GPL v2
Purchase is for PCB only. Parts will need to be purchased separately, and assembled.The link below contains a full bill of materials to complete the build, as well as the instructions on how to set the board jumpers.
Lo-tech ISA CF reference pages: blog entry, FAQ and wiki pages.
You can download the ROM files and utilities here: IDE-ROM-BIN-Files.zip
You may also want to check out the ISA CF Bracket Adapter Kit that will provide a slot in the back of your vintage PC and the SanDisk Ultra II CompactFlash Card.
