Re: Parallel Zip Drive, One More Time

["Greg Andrzejewski" <pressyourluck85@yahoo.com>]

"Michael Black" <et472@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote in message 
news:enu7eh$adm$1@theodyn.ncf.ca...
> (aiiadict@gmail.com) writes:
>> Apple inc. parallel card (PIC) is bi-directional...
>> so is grappler...
>> there may be others
>>

They are? I don't have a manual for the grappler, so I was referring to Dave 
Touvell's page about the ProGrappler.  Pretty much the only programming 
information found in the manual is:

ADDRESS    READ    WRITE
$C080,Y        Status    Output
$C081,Y                      Select bank of ROM
**Where Y = NO where N = slot #

Maybe I'm just new at this, but I think I'd need a little more information 
than that. If the card is bi-directional, how do you read from the eight 
data lines?

> Plus weren't there various parallel I/O cards that used things like the
> 6522 VIA (Versatile Interface Adaptor) that were inherently bidirectional,
> though they'd have to be initialized properly.

I'll look into that.
>
> I would have thought a far bigger problem was cooking up a driver for
> the zip drive.  The actual work of writing one, but then perhaps it's
> one of those things that would take up so much RAM space that it wouldn't
> leave much room for other things.  I don't know, but that seems harder
> than getting a bidirectional parallel port.
>
If it ever got that far, I'd definitely need help with a driver. I just 
planned to start out slow, hacking together a program to simply read/write 
blocks back and forth from the zip. Then maybe move on to a program that 
will read/write from the zip to an Apple drive or something. There are 2 
open source drivers for a parallel zip drive (linux and amiga) so the info's 
there, it's just a matter of understanding and porting it.

-Greg

>   Michael
>
>>
>> Greg Andrzejewski wrote:
>>> So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. No use hanging on to those
>>> parallel zip drives, dopesn't look like the Apple II can make much use 
>>> of
>>> them.
>>
>
>