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Re: USB Stick support of IIgs?
Jeff Blakeney wrote:
To: Warren 'Llama' Ernst
Warren 'Llama' Ernst wrote:
You can get a USB to CF Card Reader for as little as $5 on Amazon. You
can get a cardreader that reads 35 different formats for $25 or so,
and some of them fit into a front-panel drive bracket. There's no way
a USB-enabled device for your Apple II will ever be as cheap or easy
to implement as a CF Reader for your PC or Mac, so there's no point
arguing against it.
Sure, I can get that functionality for my PC cheap but it is something
else I have to buy and install and I don't even need it. Why buy a card
reader and a card that I might not be able to share data with other
people, because they don't have a reader for that type of media, rather
than just using USB stick seeing as pretty much everyone has USB ports
built into their computers?
There are USB-connected CF reader/writers available for under $10, and
when combined with a CF card, *is* a USB-attached storage device for any
PC.
When we get to talking about the Apple II, sure I can buy an IDE card
for the Apple II and a CF adaptor for it or just buy a CFFA card but
then I still need to buy the reader mentioned above for my PC too. But
those cards are limited to just being one or two IDE storage devices,
whether hard drives or CF.
If someone were to create a USB interface for the Apple II, then we
would have the potential to connect up to 127 devices (if you bought
enough USB hubs :) ) that could be storage, serial communications,
network communications, printer interface, joystick interface or
whatever. You'd just need drivers written to support these things. Much
more useful in my mind and worth spending money on. Right now, I have
SCSI storage on my Apple IIs so I can't justify spending money on an IDE
storage solution.
Wow. A single 2GB CF card contains more 32MB partitions than I can ever
mount, so I'm not sure I understand why multiple devices is a benefit.
I can unplug the CF card from my CFFA, plug it into my PC, and use
CiderPress to back up *all partitions* in a couple of minutes!
If I keep another CF card around, I can swap it into the CFFA and give
my Apple II a complete "brain transplant" in seconds. I have several
CF cards and have never found a reason to keep multiple "versions"--I
only use them to "sync" multiple Apple II's to my current "hard disk"
image.
Agreed; CF cards and a Microdrive or CFFA card meet this solution.
Given how rare floppy drives are for PCs these days, the CF solution
is even more likely to work on a wider range of computers than getting
your Apple II a rare 1.44MB SuperDrive floppy drive and controller and
shuffling floppy disks around...
If we had a USB interface for the Apple II, USB sticks would be a
solution that works on an even wider range of computers than CF. :)
Plugging in a USB device can certainly provide a complete Apple II
support environment for any PC, with hard disk images, CiderPress, and
emulators. But the incremental value in being able to plug it directly
into an Apple II (to access the hard disk image) seems pretty small to
me.
-michael
NadaNet 3.0 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."