Re: LocalTalk => dropped chars. in ProTERM?

[toddpw@avarice.ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

tschmidt@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Tim Schmidt) writes:

>I've got my IIGS set up using a Mac IIsi as a file server over LocalTalk.
>I have a 9600 baud modem that I switch between the two computers.  When
>using it on the IIGS with ProTERM 3.1, it tends to drop sets of two
>characters with annoying frequency.  On the Mac, the modem loses no
>characters.  Is this a known result of the LocalTalk interrupts?  If I
>turn off LocalTalk, will the problem go away?

LocalTalk on the IIgs is pretty disruptive. A fast ZIP accelerator helps,
but in general it's impossible to make them coexist without some serious
hacking (which I think may have been done for Spectrum, which requires GS/OS)
because of the way Apple wrote LocalTalk on the IIgs.

The reason it works fine on the Mac is that the serial drivers are massively
hacked to receive from both ports at once while LocalTalk stuff is going on.
Apple did things the clean modular way on the IIgs and we have to live with
the performance hit that implies. Rewriting things to do them the way the Mac
does them would require everyone to go through the standard IIgs firmware
(and I'm not sure we want that unless we went to a lot of trouble and
reimplemented the serial firmware).

One thing I have always wanted to do is get an Apple IIe Workstation Card
working on a IIgs and see if it absorbs enough of the overhead to fix things.
Apple doesn't support that (I asked) but with enough hacking anything is
possible...

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ ugcs.caltech.edu