Mitsubishi SSCNET

Good find!

I suppose that _might_ do the trick

I made contact with www.yurtaev.com early on.
The MDS-A-SVJ drive predates this card.
The response from www.yurtaev.com was pretty much " I doubt it ".

Can you get one sale-or-return to try it?

actually i said i'm pretty sure it won't work with MDS drives as the current firmware is SSCNET II only (MR-J2S-B drives)
i have a basic understanding of SSCNET I protocol (MR-J-B, MR-J2- and plan to implement it in the future.
but i haven't seen MDS drives yet and judging by the differences between SSCNET I and II (no similarities at all except the link-level) i can guess it will not be SSCNET-compatible either. but i just bught a MDS-A-SVJ drive on ebay and will have a look at it when it arrive. but it gonna be tough without a woking setup

My plan was to attack this with scope and logic analyzer this weekend. But my connectors and ribbon cable did not show up from Digikey today.
I realize it is a bit of a long shot that that the MDS drives will be SSCNET(ish) but it is still worth a few days of protocol snooping for the possibility that it will be savable.

It seems likely that differences could be contained in the HAL driver or card firmware, rather than having to start again from scratch.