Hello Drew,

Standard FireWire chips are intended to work in
a Pentium context, through PCI bus. The only
manageable process is use of a FPGA chip and
doing Firewire interface yourself in VHDL.
Think at buffer capacity and at a DMA control
transfer protocol. This is not a one afternoon
project!
You could buy cheap PC boards with integrated
Firewire interface, why reinvent the wheel ?

Best regards,

J.M.