Re: USB input devices?

[david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson)]

>We (the Apple II community) don't even have support for 10Mbps
>Ethernet, so I don't really believe that we'll get 12Mbps USB.  I'd
>like it (and perhaps even buy it) if somebody were to design such an
>interface, but I tend to be a bit of a realist and as such do not
>believe anybody will make (or at least succeed) in such an effort.

I have a data sheet for a USB chip designed to interface directly with
common 8 bit MCU chips (8031,68HC11 etc). It would be simple to knock up
the hardware but an Apple // would probably not have the grunt to do this
and an application at the same time.

A better idea would be a card with a micro, some memory, bus interface and
the USB chip. It would be trivial to make it look like an Apple Mouse card
(same id bytes and entry points), non trivial to support keyboards, zip
drives, scanners etc.

The big problem is the USB protocol stack - once Linux has USB drivers we
can see how much s/w is required to act as a USB host.
--
David Wilson  School of IT & CS, Uni of Wollongong, Australia  david@uow.edu.au