MSX Info pages

Beer IDE 202

BEER IDE 202 interface

How to make a IDE HDD drive interface for MSX, Designed By Egor Voznesensky (SOLID)

This design adds an IDE interface to the MSX. No MSX DOS 2 not meory mapper required (nor builtin), so perfect for MSX 1.
Made with easy to obtain cheap components and very simple to built with affordable hardware (a 8255 interface IC, an EPROM and 3 LS IC's).

 
(Photo by Juan Carlos Fekete)

BEER 202 IDE diy
Original design, Contains the hddrom.mac - BIOS ROM source (diskrom) and hddide.gif - schematic

PCB-design for BEER IDE, by Arnold Metselaar! Eagle format and postscript

BEER 202 sources of ROM and (non-functioning) HD partitioning program (read on for improved version)

Partitioning program by Adriano daCunha
Partitioning program by Adriano daCunho (read on for improved version)

- BEER202 BIOS manages a fixed number of 5 drives (each drive is a "partition" );
- each partition is  max 32MB in size;
- partitioning scheme is proprietary;
- only CHS mode is supported
- no memory mapper or MSXDOS2 required (but supported)
- 52KB/s reading speed with WSX;

Two more remarks:
-partitioning program was hanging with a Samsung SV0432A HD during initialization (while getting drive identification). I discovered that patching BEER BIOS at offset 3862h from F0h to FFh solves this issue.
- unfortunatelly, BEER202 doesn't work ok with two HDs (Samsung, 4.3GB, and a Seagate Medalist 8422, 8.6GB).

 
(Photo by Juan Carlos Fekete)

 
(Photo by Juan Carlos Fekete)

A group of Argentinian MSX users, who work togther in the Yahoo mailing list MSX Error 51 Argentina have built with succes many Beer IDE interfaces. The photos and files on these pages are supplied  by one of the members, Juan Carlos Fekete.
As you can see, a Compact Flash (via a CF to IDE converter) can be used beside standard IDE disks. The MSX Error 51  also supplied the following assembled, updated and working versions of the BIOS and the partitioning program.

BEER 202 binary and sources of BIOS ROM

Partitioning program 
The original program to create partitions in the Beer interface has an error. It was impossible to create partitions larger than 16382 kB. Juan Carlos Feketemade the necessary corrections an can make now partitions of 32767 kB.

On this Youtube movie you can see the Beer IDE in action.

Pictures by DaBest of a build interface:

http:/www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/ide/wesley.html from Luiz Leo.

Article that explains how the interface works: "How to connect an IDE disk to a microcontroller using an 8255".
This document includes info about how it works, IDE commands, limitation of 32 mb per volume, etc. It can be useful to those who want to write utilities for this interface

 

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