Teradrive Specs and upgrades

Hi,

Need to know what is what on a Terradrive mainboard

Does anyone know id all 3 models came with MCA hard drive controller or just model 3?

Near the MCA riser there is a 44pin connector, hard drive?

If I get a WD30G IBM hard drive, and get the cable will it work?

What are the specs of the hard drive and cable?

 

x

 

I am prety sure that all three machines did have the horrible 8bit XTA implementation of the IDE standard, there are not too many hard drives that are compatable and most that are are from IBM PS/1 and low end PS/2 machines. Connection wise, it is basically a 44pin IDE connector, similar to what old laptops used. The even pins mostly all ground with the +5V and +12V on the other 4 pins. If wouldn't be too difficult to wire in a IDE to CF card, although you would only get half the storage. Although a 64MB CF card will still be about what the Model 3 had...

A cheaper and far easier way is to buy an ISA IDE controller card in the one ISA slot and use a IDE to CF adapter.

 

I know that an Adaptec 1542CF ISA will work with it, this also has a built-in floppy port on it in which I will use HxC floppy controller to boot off it.

My next upgrades:
286 to 386 Now cpu socketed upgrade
Video upscaler so VGA to modern LED TV
Hard drive options:
A) zip parallel booting from Teradrive floppy Dos 3.3 with zipman device driver "Parititioned 3x32mb partitioned"
B) converting a Backpack Parallel CDROM drive to run a hard drive
C) XTIDE card with 32mb CF card
D) ISA AHA-1542CF Scsi card, built-in Floppy to boot HxC floppy emulator and attach external CDROM and external HDD from my AppleIIgs / Amiga 500 collection

Really want to save the ISA slot so I can either install a soundcard like my MPU-401 w/ Rolant MT32

or install a RAM extender.

I got an AST 286 ram card with 4mg ram installed, that would give me 4+2.5 6.5mb in ram to run more stuff!!!

Just ordered a Parallel LS120 drive which is also a Parallel to IDE unit, hope this works better.

 

x

 

I can't really see the desire or need to really upgrade the Teradrive as a PC. It is more a collectors item nowdays and for what you are going to spend trying to upgrade the machine you could probably get a reasonable 386 / 486 PC to run old games and still have change.

The machine has too many limitations with a single 16 bit ISA slot, a soldered on 286 CPU, a cheap 8bit implementation of the IDE standard with a non standard IDE connector, a power supply that would struggle to run anything more then a single hard drive and a standard bi directional parallel port.

One reason you never really saw parallel port hard drives back in the late 80s and early 90s is that the bi directional parallel port had a maximum bandwidth of about 200KB which is about 80 times slower then the maximum bandwidth of an IDE drive and still 20 times slower then a MFM drive. Using a Zip drive via a parallel port means a transfer speed of about 120KB a second, or about twice the speed of a floppy disc...

Also the 286 is soldered to the board, so to use a 386 accelerator board you are going to have to desolder it and replace it with a socket. Although there are clip on 486 accelerator boards for soldered on 386 chips there is nothing for the 286. Also remember that changing the crystal to get a faster speed may stop some of the onboard components from working correctly.

ISA expansion boxes do exist but they tend to be quite expensive, more so then what you could get a full 386/486 computer with everything.

Yes you could use EMS memory expansion cards to increase memory. but depending on what card you have will depend on how useful it will be. Remember once you go into the realms of the 386, the bottleneck of ISA cards does limit how useful they would be, most cards were designed for the 286 due to it only offering protected mode. There is probably little outside Windows and OS/2 that would really require >2mb on a 286 based machine.

 

Currently I am running the Teradrive on
Config #1 a Parallel Zip drive (Z100P + Zipman) with 30mb x 3 partitions on a Adlib Gold sound card.
Config #2 Adaptec 1542CF SCSI 100mb + CDROM , both DOS/V 3.3 the DOS games are just so much fun.
Config #3 LS-120 Parallel port booting on a 120Mb disk, 3x30mb partition assigned c: d: e: + AST 286 ISA card w/4mb RAM a total of 6.5mb ram can be use, WHOA!!
The Parallel port is Bi_Directional speed is so so, what can you do about it, live with it!!

I have purchased a Sync-doubler adaptor for my VGA so it can sync from 31zhz to 15mhz on my 55" LED TV!!

I've also just recieved my FM Towns May and AMSTRAD Mega-PC 386SX upgraded to 486DX not much fun as the TeraDrive

ALso got a lead for a 286 >> 386 Socket cpu upgrade and Cyrix 486 upgrade for my Marty....

This is one hellofa Christmas!!

 

x

 

Found this sync doubler on ebay, $40 originally made for Jamma boards.

Also someone is selling a Teradrive Model 3: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/SEGA-TERA-DR...in_0&hash=item53eff52d38&_uhb=1#ht_5471wt_972

 

Figured I'd just reply here for future reference... Sorry for the late reply...

I can confirm that at least models 2 and 3 came with the 44-pin hard drive connector on the ISA riser.
I've got a WDL-330P in my TeraDrive (Stolen from a IBM PS/2 286 Model 30 I believe...)
I did get a chance to try a WDI-325Q however found it did not like being recognised.
The WDI-325Q came out of an IBM PS/2 8086 Model 30. Very different beasts those 8086 vs 286 models of PS/2.
At the moment I am playing around with XT-IDE cards in mine. A disk on module with 5V along pin 20 is best...
Sadly I only have one that works, the rest have no voltage down pin 20. Bah!
Hope you had some success with yours.
I tend to find it more a collectors item than a functional piece of hardware... but I do like my collection to do something!

And don't you hate it when you google something and only your posts and website comes up?
There's a boatload of photos of the TeraDrive hardware and voltage pinouts in the photo gallery on mcretro.net as well.
I keep having to change the photo gallery link... sorry about that to anyone who hot links!