i.Link on a Raspberry Pi

[tpimh]

This is probably a very niche topic, but still.

i.Link (aka FireWire 400 aka IEEE 1394) is a port found on early models of fat PS2: SCPH-390xx and earlier. It can be used to connect a hard drive to PS2, but there are multiple problems with it:

• not all IEEE1394->IDE or IEEE1394->SATA chips are supported (some good ones include Oxford OXUF934, JMicron JMB353)
• such adapters are not made anymore, and are becoming harder to find on a second-hand market
• byte-swapping functionality is seemingly not implemented in iLink controller, so IOP needs to be working really hard changing endianness of all the data that is going through it, thus the maximum speed is limited

It was suggested by @rickgaiser, that it's theoretically possible to use a Linux computer instead of a hard drive. What can be done:

• try to load games from a Linux computer equipped with a FireWire card using unmodified OPL
• design a HAT for RPi 5 or a motherboard for RPi CM4 using VT6315N (this is PCIe->IEEE1394, so older RPi can't be used, but something from Rockchip probably is an option), this would make it a nice portable solution
• do the byte-swapping on the Linux side, so the maximum speed can be achieved

Is iLink still a relevant when we have IDE, Ethernet, MX4SIO? Will such project be worth the effort?