Re: Apple II Workstation Card as serial port

[schmidtd <schmidtd@my-deja.com>]

On Sep 23, 5:01 pm, Hugh Hood <hughh...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> David,
>
> I bought one of these several months ago for potential use with a netatalk
> network and found myself wondering the same things about the serial ports.
>
> As you know, the card uses a Zilog 8530 SCC (same as IIGS), but the
> "documentation" of the serial port feature of the card really just mentions
> firmware compatibility with the Super Serial Card, and makes no mention of
> being able directly to address the 8530 registers or even how to select
> which of the two ports to use, other than by some configuration program
> included with the software accompanying the card.

In the deep research I've done through Google ;-), I have come across
a thread where David Empson dashes all our hopes:

"The Workstation card uses a different serial chip (Z8530 SCC
instead of a 6551), and the Apple II has no direct control of it
anyway
- it is controlled by the 65C02 microprocessor on the workstation
card,
with which the Apple II exchanges data."

-- http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.apple2/browse_frm/thread/abf045bd651e83c

> There was some mention of more hardware/firmware details on the card being
> available in the APDA AppleShare Programmer's Guide for the Apple II that
> Sheppy now sells on the Syndicomm site, but I can't confirm that.

Ah, now that would be cool.  With the 6502 running the board, I
imagine you can offload interesting networking stuff to it... but I
also imagine it's completely specific to AppleTalking. ;-)