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Re: Hi-speed serial interfacing from A2



On 07/19/2010 01:12 PM, Scott Alfter wrote:
In article<58OdnUYYxaV5T9zRnZ2dnUVZ_tCdnZ2d@giganews.com>,
Steven Hirsch<snhirsch@gmail.com>  wrote:
I just _know_ there was discussion of this subject within the last year or
so, but )&(^ Google doesn't turn up anything.  I'm interested in writing a
filesystem driver to support an A2 as client on a DriveWire server.  This
is a simple protocol developed for the Tandy CoCo, but it's generic enough
to be adapted for almost any small box.

The CoCo can bit-bang serial communications at 115k baud, so I'm hopeful
that something like this is possible for some flavor of Apple 2.  There was
some talk of folks achieving hi-speed serial I/O on bus cards (Super Serial
card?), but cannot find the thread.

I'm not sure what kind of speed I'm getting from it (haven't run the
numbers), but I have software and a simple adapter that plugs into the
16-pin joystick port that connects an Apple II to 1-Wire devices.  Take a
look at the first two projects here:

http://alfter.us/computers/apple2/software.aspx

"1-Wire Apple II Primitives" is the original version, written in a mix of
assembly language and BASIC.  Device discovery is fairly slow (a few seconds
per device) as I wrote that part in BASIC, but reading/writing bits and
bytes is reasonably fast.

"Apple II Beer Fridge Controller" contains the same routines, rewritten in C
(with some inline assembly language) and built for the Apple II with cc65.

Maybe there's something in there that might be useful for your purposes.

Very cool - thanks! I think Don Lancaster's game port serial driver has a usable starting point for the outgoing data. I'm going to drop him a note and see if he ever wrote any routines for incoming.

There's a wealth of information coming in and I appreciate it!

Steve