Interesting IDE, tnt32. 3 times faster than Beer 202, probably as fast as Sunrise IDE. DiskROM is BEER 202 based, same features (5 drives, same partitioning scheme, CHS only). Seems that Egor's HDPREP can be used for partitioning. I believe it's more complex (and expensive) than BEER to build due to the PLD, but the hardware guys can tell more about this issue.

I'm very curious to know if this interface will work with Compact Flash IDE adapters. I was searching the Internet and the CF adapter is very easy to find on Ebay (Here in Brazil is not so easy) and simple to build one.

Due to the constant growth of digital camera resolution, there are a lot of used CF to sell with a good capacity (MB). 32 MB CF could be a very nice option to be used in a MSX.

Adriano told us that he got 52KB/s in his tests. I was thinking: If we use a Compact Flash (without any mechanical parts) would the transfer rate be better ?

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Adriano told us that he got 52KB/s in his tests. I was thinking: If we use a Compact Flash (without any mechanical parts) would the transfer rate be better ?

At least power consumption (and noise!) both should drop significantly :-)

I think it depends on a type of CF. If it's one of the firstgen 16 or 32MB cards, I doubt it'll be faster. But if it's one of modern 60-speed cards (i.e. ~9MBytes/s) will beat the crap out of any old CHS-based IDE HDD. But at speeds indicated above I think the bottleneck is in interface, not in drive. So what will speedup I/O is CPU speed. Try installing Super Turbo mod with a decent Z80 (Z084C0020?) and clock it at 20MHz and see how speed goes up

dhau is right. Probably even the slowest CHS HDD is still fast enough for decent transfer speeds on MSX. The bottleneck is really the CPU power: BEER has a cheap hardware, but the price you pay is less performance. I believe that even a modern CF card will not get higher transfer speeds with BEER but, anyway, I think 52K/s with such simple hardware on a MSX1 is great.

The Sunrise ATA IDE doesn't get more than 300kB/s out of it...

However, MegaSCSI (expensive!) would get about 600 or 650kB/s... Or so I've heard. I think a lot of bottlenecks are there due to code issues.

According to Sunrise site (http://www.msx.ch/sunformsx/products/hardware/ide.html), Sunrise IDE gets almost 300K/s on a TR. About the bottlenecks on Sunrise IDE, I don't believe it's due to code issues. Sunrise IDE BIOS is very well coded (I know its code from disassembling), so I believe that the bottleneck is indeed due to hardware issues (not int the inteface itself, but in ATA IDE itself - you must control/set too much things for communicating with the ATA IDE device).

I have updated all information available on the BEER IDE 202 interface, including the sources of the disk partitioning program by Egor and links to relevant information on the MSX Do it Yourself page on my website http://www.hansotten.com
Thanks to JP Grobler for continuing the search!

Great, Hans! I was goingo to mail you asking for such update in your pages.

In Brazil, the solution I found is to buy one of that 6-in-1 USB card adapters that are being sold in Mercado Livre (our local E-Bay) for R$ 20-30 and from there building a CF - IDE adapter. Is just a board with some rewire, I'll post schematics/board as soon as I have free time to do that.

Any user experiences?

PCB-design for BEER IDE thanks to Arnold Metselaar.
Available at http://www.hansotten.com - MSX Whats New

In Eagle format and postscript. Arnold says the design is not tested, so use at your own risk!

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Any user experiences?

Well, the IDE BIOS hangs with almost all 2,5" notebook drives, the only one I got past to the disk boot was a 20Mb(!) very very very old drive...
Some are detected, but I cant get a boot from floppy...

The HDDPREP program from Egor have some errors (A:>as.com hddprep.mac report alot of errors (a $updateok symbol doesn't exist, an ld hl(startp), many ld hl,SEC and a warning inc h,(ix+1))

I have tested more than 10 notebook drives, from 20Mb to 6Gb.

LD hl(startp) ... can be LD hl,(startp)
ld hl,SEC ??? check if SEC label is defined

inc h,(ix+1) doesn't exists, change it for LD h,(ix+1)

Hi duds
Beer is cool too get drunk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!