Thanks to James Pearce I've finally completed my XT-CF v1 card!
James is the designer of this board and he provided me the code (which you can find HERE) to program the Xilinx XC9572XL CLPD to make it usable with recent revisions of the XT-IDE Universal BIOS.
The XT-CF v1, ready to be tested!
The CLPD needs to be programmed via JTAG: I used a Dangerous Prototypes Bus Pirate v4 to play the XSVF file and get the board ready for use (actually it also needs a bios flashed, which can be done by booting DOS on a newer PC with ISA slots and programming it from there).
JTAG programming via Bus Pirate
After programming the board, I installed it into an IBM XT clone with the following specs:
NEC V20 cpu @10Mhz
512Kb RAM
CGA Video board
Now the computer boots FreeDOS 1.1 from a 2Gb CF card. Here is a photo showing some partition data:
All 2 gigabytes are detected and usable!
The XT-CF provides a cheap and easy-to-use (you can pull the CF from the back of the computer, without opening it!) storage solution for this old machine. No use of specific drivers or software is needed: the disks are detected and immediately available for use (You will need to take into account partition size limits for FAT16, though!).
the CF card, popping out from the back
XT-CF installed in its cozy slot, between the video card and sound blaster
And finally, here is a video of the machine booting up:
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