Vortex Winchester Drive
A HardDiscDrive (HDD) solution for the CPC.
Actually the first for the CPC.
Produced by the German company Vortex
The Harddisc was build about 1986. It have the same cases like the F1-S and the F1-D. A big Power Supply which have about 1,5 Kilograms gives the power to the Harddrive. The Harddrive was shipped with the Powersupply The Harddrive itself, a built in 5,25" DD Diskdrive with 720KB and a Controller which was used for being the MFM Controller with two ports for two MFM Harddiscs, two DD Floppys and a ROM board which give place for 2 Roms, which held the VDOS 2.0
The Contoller get the Power from the Harddisc.
You can connect up to two 60MB MFM Drives which are supported by the VDOS 2.0.
But the normal setup was with a 20 MB MFM Drive.
A Software Package consists of a few helpful tools:
- LowLevel Format
- Partition tools
- Format partitions
- Patch for CPM 2.2 and 3.0 (Plus) to support the Drive
- File/Disccopy Tools
- Diskformat
- Hexeditor
- and a few more...
Technical
CPCAI magazine claims the device has a WD1010 Winchester controller inside. It certainly seems to be WD1010 compatible.
The WD1010 has different commands and communication method compared to the Dobbertin (which appears to use SASI) and modern IDE (which uses ATA). It looks to be an ancester of the IDE because of the seperate cylinder and sector registers and a single command write to initiate commands but it's not the same as IDE/ATA.
Therefore the software & hardware is *not* compatible with other interfaces.
Port decoding appears to be:
bit 9 = wd1010 a2 bit 1 = wd1010 a1 bit 0 = wd1010 a0
bit 10 = 0 bit 2 = 0
Except for bit 8, other bits are 1. It is not known which bits are decoded by the interace.
Bit 8 is 1 or 0, maybe it can't be either, but if it is set it could clash with other i/o. Maybe the ports chosen here don't clash.
Ports used and their function:
FBFA - wd1010 sdh register (read/write) FBFB - wd1010 write command (write)/wd1010 read status register (read) F9F8 - WD1010 data register (read/write) F9F9 = wd1010 precomp register (write) F9FA = wd1010 sector count register (read/write) F9FB = wd1010 sector number register (read/write) FAF8 = wd1010 cylinder low register (read/write) FAF9 = wd1010 cylinder high register (read/write) FAFA = drive/head select? drive bits match those in sdh. (write)
wd1010 documentation says head select/drive select not available as outputs.
Furthur details:
- MFM
- 256 bytes per sector.
- 32 sectors per cylinder
- AMSDOS & CPM based filesystem
- ROM doesn't autodetect hard disk. It asks you if it is connected and if you answer yes it accesses the drive. It can hang if no drive is connected.
