Re: iic boot from serial port?

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 16 Feb 2001 08:40:30 +1100, david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson) wrote:

>CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney) writes:
>>On 14 Feb 2001 08:28:31 +0100, pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
>
>>>Why bother with the serial port?  Why not instead use the parallell
>>>port also on the Apple II side?  By using the various printer status
>>>lines as input, one can transfer a whole nibble at a time, and not
>>>just one bit at a time as on the serial port.
>
>>The problem here is that the only bi-directional parallel card for the
>>Apple II that I'm aware of is the Profile controller card and it is
>>pretty rare.
>
>I have an Epson printer card which consists of nothing more than an EPROM
>and a 6821 PIA chip. This would be easy to run bi-directionally. Are any
>other printer cards constructed this way? 6522 VIA, 8255 PPI, 6520/6820/6821
>PIA etc all would have that capability.

Designing and building a new bi-directional parallel card probably
wouldn't be too hard.  However, the question becomes how useful would
it be in this day of USB and FireWire?

I'm not sure how the other existing parallel cards are designed so I
can't really tell you if they would be able to be modified for
bi-directional use or not.

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