Steven Hirsch a �crit :
sio2pc and Drivewire are greats, but are using standard serial port, wich is limited to 19200bps on the //c. In other hand we have the smartbus, specific serial line at 250kbps, where devices are recognized directly by the system without any changes. I think we can't compare them. Maybe I miss the point, let me know. For the Apple 2 there is ADT and ADTPro to transfert floppy disk trough serial port, wich is another thing.Peltier Cedric wrote:Seeing my old //c lying together with an old PC on the same desk, I remembered the need of a mass storage for the //c.This is how the project began.I made a specific cable to connect the smartport of the //c to the // port of the PC, and started to write the software to emulate an hard drive for the //c. All seem to work fine now: from the //c I can format, read, write, and even boot from the emulated 32 mega bytes hard drive (under prodos). So it's time to do this announce, I think this project will be of interest for some of you, right ?In theory, yes, but...Cons: - require a 486 class PC, no pentiumThis is a major hurdle for most folks. Even a packrate like me has barely one machine of that vintage functioning.There are plenty of examples out there showing how such a driver might be done for Linux. Poke around for sio2pc (Atari) and Drivewire (Tandy CoCo).
Maybe a driver for the smartbus is possible under linux, but I don't know if we could sample reliably a 250KHz serial line through even modern PC I/O under a multitasking environnement (I will give it a try) without a dedicated hardware. From my point of view, using such dedicated hardware on a modern system look pointless for the task, better to do a stand alone system from scratch interfacing the smartbus to IDE or SD. I hope I exposed constraints clearly.
The 486 was the primary target because I have some of them lying around.This limitation concern this first version, pentium and upwards (pentium II and III) are planned if somebody want it, such computers are more common than 486.