Re: Commodore drives can be controlled on Apple II serial!

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 22 Mar 98 22:39:14 GMT, david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson) wrote:

>Before I purchased a Floptical drive (SCSI 720/1440/20000KB floppy drive), I
>was going to make a small card with a SCSI controller chip, 65c02, RAM and
>an ISA slot into which I would plug a multi-I/O card with 2x serial,
>1x parallel, 2x floppy disk, 2x IDE. This would then give any Apple // with
>a SCSI card access to 360/720/1200/1440 floppy disks (and possibly IDE disk
>or CD-ROM). The only problem would be a box and power supply for it.
>
>If such a card became popular, it could be made with the super-I/O chip
>on the same PCB and cut out the ISA bus. Alternatively, a 2nd ISA slot would
>make room for an ethernet card.

Making an Apple II slot to ISA slot adapter would be cool for doing
stuff like this.  I've thought about such a project myself but not a
whole lot, yet.

I wanted to ask you about your first card idea.  It sounds like a neat
idea but seems to be a bit overkill in my opinion.  There are already
SCSI cards available for the IIs so we don't really need another one,
although it would be nice to have another option.  But I think it
would be best as a separate card.

As to putting an ISA slot interface on it to plug a multi-IO card
into, why not just get a multi-IO card chipset and put it on an Apple
II interface card with appropriate support circuitry?  It would save
you the hassle of doing a ISA slot interface and would probably work
much better.  You could even add disk caching to the card and we would
finally have another bi-directional parallel port for the Apple IIs.

Mind you having an Apple II slot to ISA interface would be cool
because then you could support alot of different ISA cards just by
writing drivers for them.  Mulit-IO, ethernet, VGA/SVGA video, sound
cards and maybe even video capture cards.

Personally, as nice as that ISA interface would be, I still think I
would prefer to have someone take the chipsets from those ISA cards
and put them on Apple II cards as I believe they would work better
this way.

I can go either way though.  If it means that I can have an ethernet
connection with my IIgs sooner, I'd be quite happy with the ISA
interface.  :-)

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