grant@torque.net
Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:00:57 -0500 (EST)
> Hey, I have a special one for you. I often scour surplus computer
> places for ancient equiment and found an old (but not ancient) "BSR
> 6800MX" (circa 1991) cdrom drive.
Fun, but often very frustrating ...
> It claims to be on a parallel interface (and has a DB25 cable).
How does it make this claim ?
My first reaction was that this was for a C64 or an Atari. The name
"BSR" rings bells, but I can't quite place which belfry they're in :-(
(Partly because I had an academic research project called BSR at that
time which overwhelms other minor memories.)
There were serial devices for Commodore boxes and other weird stuff
on the market back then.
> electronics/mechanism inside are Mitsumi and I'm about to hit it with
> the parport IDE modules to see if one takes, but I don't expect that
> to work (the box almost certainly predates ATAPI equipment) which
> means it's most likely parallel-port SCSI or something proprietary.
If the drive is Mitsumi from that period, the whole drive is probably
in a little drawer with a lid that you have to lift up ... They
used an IDE-style interface, but it was strictly proprietary: basically
the entire device was controlled through two registers. Commands had
to be delivered as serial writes to a single address - within a very
limited time interval. This presented a challenge to the brave folks
that were trying to make parallel port versions.
I've only ever seen one PP implementation based on the old Mitsumi drive.
It was from MicroSolutions, and used an earlier variant of the same
adapter that is in current products. I have a driver for it, it's
called "bpmcd" and is available on ftp.torque.net, but it hasn't
been upgraded to 2.2 - and I'm unlikely to do it.
For sure, the PARIDE drivers don't have a chance.
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Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Sun 28 Mar 1999 - 17:02:14 EST