Re: iic boot from serial port?

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Sat, 17 Feb 2001 18:40:24 +0900, Paul Guertin <pg@sff.net> wrote:

>No, and that's part of the fun of writing your own driver. IIRC,
>there are 5 lines available on the Grappler, which means you can
>receive only 4 bits at a time.
>
>I experimented with this five years ago, made a cable and wrote
>some software that worked sometimes, but all my notes are in
>storage, unfortunately.

Then, while this may be fun for someone to do, I don't see this as
giving much of a speed improvement over using a serial connection.  At
least not for reading, which is the most important as it is done most
often.

Writing would be faster by a fair amount so it might be worthwhile for
someone who needs to write lots of data from their Apple II to another
computer.

It also kind of eliminates the possibility using this system to hook
up two Apple IIs together unless you code the driver to support only
sending 4 bits at a time instead of 8.

Personally, I'd stick to a serial driver as null modem cables are
easily found or made and it is a standard way of connecting computers.
If a bi-directional parallel card is ever created, it would be fairly
simple to create a new driver to support it at its full capability
from the serial version's source.

Heck, if someone were to create a bi-directional parallel card, they
could create the card in such a way that it could support booting over
the parallel connection and even have on board cache.  :-)

--
 Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II Unversity on A2Central.com