Why don't you buy Link97 from here?
http://www.wbsystemtechnik.de/atari/
I wrote about that the Link97 could become "freeware" in the previous thread:
http://forums.atari.org/read.php3?num=3&id=15584&thread=15579
Well, nothing on the Link97 is expensive ;-) It contains only one chip - a CPLD logic, which needs to be programed in VHDL language. To do this, you need to know:
- VHDL language
- SCSI protocol of communication
- ACSI protocol which describes how to communicate with Link97 interface.
So:
- there are VHDL tutorials on the internet for free, the price of CPLD logic chips is low
- SCSI protocol is well described on the internet, but there are almost no practical how-to's about connecting SCSI drive to anything (like to single-chip micro-controler).
The situation is a lot better with IDE drives, because so many people successfully connected IDE disk drives to so many kinds of micro-controles (like Atmel, PIC, ...) so there are many practical informations on the internet about this.
- ACSI communication protocol with Link97 is partialy described in Atari ST Profibuch (which signals are activated on read/write from/to ACSI port).
Communicating with ICD-like host-adapters it just sending the ID of device (with which we want to communicate) first ORed with something (I dont remember the value right now) and the rest of the bytes writen is just standart SCSI-2 command packet (from 6 to 16 bytes).
So you simply need just someone who knows VHDL (or want's to learn it very fast) and will spend much time with developing this...
