Re: Parallel Zip Drive, One More Time

["Greg Andrzejewski" <pressyourluck85@yahoo.com>]

"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote in message 
N_edndDCrM9Akj7YnZ2dnUVZ_o6gnZ2d@comcast.com">news:N_edndDCrM9Akj7YnZ2dnUVZ_o6gnZ2d@comcast.com...
> Mark McDougall wrote:
>> Michael Black wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I would have thought a far bigger problem was cooking up a driver for
>>>the zip drive.  The actual work of writing one, but then perhaps it's
>>>one of those things that would take up so much RAM space that it wouldn't
>>>leave much room for other things.  I don't know, but that seems harder
>>>than getting a bidirectional parallel port.
>>
>>
>> IIRC, SCSI isn't that much work to setup and get running (admittedly
>> it's been a *long* time since I wrote a windows SCSI Miniport Driver).
>>
>> On top of that though, you need to write a filesystem driver for it, at
>> least if you're going to use a FAT-compatible filesystem for PC<->A2
>> transfers. Otherwise I guess you can simply layer some Apple DOS over
>> the top?!?
>
> Just use CiderPress on the PC side to access either ProDOS or
> HFS partitions.
>
> On the Apple side, once you have block read and block write, you
> can make it look like a standard block device and Apple OS's will
> work fine with it.  Under ProDOS, the trick would be finding a place
> to put the driver code.  ;-(  It would be easier if you could put
> the driver in ROM on a bidirectional parallel card.
>
Yeah, that would be nice. In fact, building a new parallel card is the 
preferred way to go. But that defeats the purpose of what I am/was trying to 
do, which is get a parallel zip drive usable with as little new hardware as 
possible.
-Greg
> -michael
>
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