Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:04 am
Steve Anderson wrote:I do tend to agree, the 40 pins (less one) doesn't put me off nor do the commands which as you say are somewhat simpler. What does is the size, weight and primarily the power consumption of a hard-drive...assuming that's what you were inferring.
Aye, it's not such a big deal when you already have a huge PSU on the desk to drive everything else. There is CF which has an ATA compatible mode as you mention.
Steve Anderson wrote:Not having used a Spectrum I didn't know it had an SPI interface. Here I'm starting from zero and trying to minimize the number of chips required. The 40-pin device has most of its ports unused, I plan to replace it with a 'reduced' version when my supplier here can be bothered to get some.
There is no native SPI. You could bit bang on a decoded I/O port but I have a feeling that the interface I've seen has a simple pair of SIPO and PISO shift registers so you can read and write 8 bits at a time.
I don't own that particular interface so I don't know, as I say I stick with IDE as all you need is a 7410 and a pnp transistor to hook it up to the cpu