Re: Virtual serial drive

[Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com>]

David Schmidt <schmidtd@my-deja.com> wrote:
> On 9/14/2012 1:35 PM, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>> David Schmidt <schmidtd@my-deja.com> wrote:
>>> On 9/13/2012 6:19 PM, Sean Fahey wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, September 13, 2012 1:34:20 PM UTC-5, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Be careful--the next logical step is having your IIc just be a terminal for
>>>>> an emulator running on the PC. And the serial link is too slow for
>>>>> graphics!
>>>>> 
>>>>> I do like the idea of getting the time/date with each vdisk access...
>>>> 
>>>> Well... let's toy with this idea. Why not a small form factor machine,
>>>> like a Raspberry Pi or similar mini 'PC' that could provide HD
>>>> partitions (and/or disk serving), clock functions (at least date and
>>>> time stamping) and serial to ethernet connectivity at the same time?
>>>> That's the kind of love the //c (and IIc+) could benefit from.
>>>> 
>>>> Until the SPVHD is shipping again (it's supposed to be getting a clock
>>>> driver too), a serial solution may be the only viable option for a long time.
>>> 
>>> Is there a protocol for transporting the date/time somewhere I can look
>>> at?  Is there maybe a status request I can implement or something?
>> 
>> I'd suggest putting it into every vdisk protocol packet from the host in
>> 4-byte ProDOS format. Then the client could just copy it to the ProDOS
>> global page.
> 
> That's straightforward.  Does it have to be every disk access - or could
> it happen at initialization time and be done?

Ideally every block read. Then the time-date stamps would all be accurate
to the second, and any program wanting the info could just pick it up from
the global page. 

I suppose the frequency of transferring the date bytes could be reduced,
but it's only two bytes--and then there's the conditional code to deal with
midnight,,,  Better to keep it trivial. ;-)

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon