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From: jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: MIO board and imbedded SCSI drives...
Message-ID: <1935@crash.cts.com>
Date: 24 Mar 90 05:56:06 GMT
Sender: root@crash.cts.com
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
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gdtltr@freezer.it.udel.edu (Gary Duzan) writes:
>In article <1915@crash.cts.com> jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) writes:
>=>Will this piece of hardware handicap me?  Apparently the MIO board will.
>=>The biggest MFM ST412/506 drive I've seen is a 120 Mb.  Now anybody who knows
>=>anything about the 65816 knows that it can beat the hell out of an 80286 if
>=>the proper motherboard is designed around it regardless of what AMD and Harris
>=>do to enhance the 80286.  Now think of this, if you have a powerful enough
>=>machine, you damn well are going to need as much hard drive space as you can
>=>get.  I have yet to see an actual limit to embedded SCSI drives.  Hell, I've
>=>put 400 Mb CDC's in Mac's, now if you people want to see the 8-bit evolve into
>=>a 16-bit machine (which is what the T-816 is for) along with evolve into a
>=>32-bit machine (there is a 65832 on the drawing board), then you had better
>=>question these stupid design flaws which I do all the time.
>=>
>   I want to know exactly what the problem is between the MIO & the imbedded
>SCSI drives before I get too heated, but it is quite a hassle. As far as the
>65816 vs. 80286, I don't think I'd want to race a 1.75Mhz 65816 against a
>12Mhz 80286. Once we manage to get the clock speed up, then we will have quite
>a system. I have a Turbo-816, and there is no noticable speedup with regular
>software, and I have yet to run any 65816-specific programs on the thing. If
>anyone wants to give me some hints on how to port GCC to a 65816 cross-
>compiler, let me know. I started writing a C compiler for the thing a while
>back, but I think I better wait until I get to my compiler design course before
>putting my brain back to that task.
 
The fastest 65816 is 8 MHz.  One could design a nice machine around an 8 MHz
chip which may probably be up to par with a 12 MHz 286.  Remember, the WDC
chips are more of a RISC architecture.

>=>There's a difference between dare to be different and dare to be stupid.
>=>
>   Tell that to "Wierd Al" Yancovich (sp?). :-]
>
>=>I don't put up with stupidity in systems I configure and install whether they
>=>be Sun workstations, Macintoshes, or IBM compatables and I sure as hell won't
>=>tolerate it with the systems I have at home that I play with whether they be
>=>386 machines, Atari ST's (if I ever decide to finally get one, I won't unless
>=>somebody makes an ethernet board for them), or Atari XL/XE.
>=> 
>   I hear that there are SCSI Ethernet boards in existence. I would love to
>have one for my MIO (if I can write a driver for it). :-]

There are SCSI ethernet devices out there, but those are for the Mac.  Also, I
doubt if you could implement TCP/IP in a 64K address space, but you could do
it in a 65816 address space of 16 Mb.  There are a lot of parallelisms between
the 65816 and the 80286.
 
     // JCA

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