Re: Parallel Zip Drive, One More Time

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.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.

-michael

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