Richard,

I'll try to answer these one by one.

First the wirewrap vs solder thing. This is kind of an easy answer. I don't have a wirewrap tool, the wire, the sockets, or even the knowledge to use them at the moment. Wouldn't mind trying to use this stuff but, last time I've priced the tool alone it was out of my range (ie over $5). This was not a matter of time / waiting but more of I can't find the money for this.

Second the planning issue. Though admittedly not as well planned as it should be I did plan this out. If it breaks one day I'll be oh well, no big deal. This project isn't for school or work. . . it's just for my fun (to which it is working out very well).

Third yep I'm reinventing the wheel. Okay yes there are loads of 8052 IDE plans out there but I'm not building any of those circuits for one reason or another (though some of them are good for reference). I'd rather reinvent the wheel and have a lot better understanding of what I'm building. Kind of like the fish proverb that Erik uses all the time, I'd rather know how to correctly hookup and ide drive (using the ATA spec) than to just follow what someone has posted somewhere and end up making a mistake like connecting the CS line to high like one circuit I found did.

Fourth, parts that fit? As far as I know my parts fit perfectly, not sure what you mean. I got the DS89C420 and the DS232A as samples from Dallas. I'm using a 32Mhz crystal oscillator module, a 74HC244, a couple of headers and some passives what doesn't fit?

Fifth, am I in a hurry? I may rush at times but mostly because I have a 20 month old son that enjoys my company all the time, so time to work on this is quite limited. Over all I'm not in that big of a hurry.

Sixth the memory issue. First of all it's in issue with the internal SRAM for this specific chip (DS89C420) not an issue with just "XRAM". I have no idea if using external memory works or not yet. And as far as how I determined that there is a problem (with code or hardware) is that I'm not receiving the correct information back that I should be (ie I'm trying to put something in memory and it's either not there or not reading correctly when I try to read it later). I'm still trying to find time to work on that more but have yet to further investigate this though I intend to.

Finally I'm not all that worried about it, I don't really plan to unsolder anything but I may have a pcb made later and build a better version on this circuit (since I happen to have an extra piece of all the parts I'm using).

All in all again it's just for fun. Also I'm still new to this and have plenty of other things to work on for this project.

List of other things(not in any order):
slave SPI port (or I2C)
FAT32 R/W support (possibly formatting too)
8 bit parallel access support (ie using 8 data lines and a couple control lines to allow other micro controllers to access files on the hd)
hd duping (not that difficult actually)
zip drive access (need to read more into atapi)
using hd drive interupts.
etc.. . (sorry getting tired be writing this for over an hour)