Re: Commodore drives can be controlled on Apple II serial!

[david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson)]

CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney) writes:

>On 22 Mar 98 22:39:14 GMT, david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson) wrote:

>>Before I purchased a Floptical drive (SCSI 720/1440/20000KB floppy drive), I
>>was going to make a small card with a SCSI controller chip, 65c02, RAM and
>>an ISA slot into which I would plug a multi-I/O card with 2x serial,
>>1x parallel, 2x floppy disk, 2x IDE. This would then give any Apple // with
>>a SCSI card access to 360/720/1200/1440 floppy disks (and possibly IDE disk
>>or CD-ROM). The only problem would be a box and power supply for it.
>>
>>If such a card became popular, it could be made with the super-I/O chip
>>on the same PCB and cut out the ISA bus. Alternatively, a 2nd ISA slot would
>>make room for an ethernet card.

>Making an Apple II slot to ISA slot adapter would be cool for doing
>stuff like this.  I've thought about such a project myself but not a
>whole lot, yet.

>I wanted to ask you about your first card idea.  It sounds like a neat
>idea but seems to be a bit overkill in my opinion.  There are already
>SCSI cards available for the IIs so we don't really need another one,
>although it would be nice to have another option.  But I think it
>would be best as a separate card.

This card is not a SCSI card for the Apple but a SCSI target to connect to
your existing SCSI bus (and existing controller card). The disks attached to
the card would appear to be SCSI disks as far as the Apple was concerned
(although with more than one disk it would probably need to use SCSI LUNs
which may or may not work with existing SCSI cards on the Apple //).

>As to putting an ISA slot interface on it to plug a multi-IO card
>into, why not just get a multi-IO card chipset and put it on an Apple
>II interface card with appropriate support circuitry?  It would save
>you the hassle of doing a ISA slot interface and would probably work
>much better.  You could even add disk caching to the card and we would
>finally have another bi-directional parallel port for the Apple IIs.

That was what I mentioned in the 2nd paragraph of my posting.
--
David Wilson  School of IT & CS, Uni of Wollongong, Australia  david@uow.edu.au