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Re: Hardware musings
Justin England wrote:
It should be fairly easy to find a USB to
TTL device that could talk to a PIC, and the PIC could directly manage the
drive.
You can get PICs with USB built-in!
Again, I have
forgotten most of what I knew about A2 hardware, but I can't imagine it
being horribly difficult to "emulate" a disk ][ controller with a PIC
considering it should have to ability to do the timing critical functions.
I'm not intimately familiar with A2 hardware myself, but anything that can
be done in TTL shouldn't be overly difficult, though you're best looking at
a CPLD methinks...
The ideas behind this are that it would make "boot strapping" a //[c,e,gs]
much easier if you have no boot disks, and, more importantly, it would be
much easier / faster / convenient to use CiderPress on my PC to create real
disks from the images d/l'ed from the internet (as opposed to using A2
utilities.)
To some extent, yes. But in the last week I've been playing around with an
Amiga A1200 I purchased recently, and it has a number of interesting options
for transferring data to/from a PC. Similar in concept to ADT is
AmigaExplorer, which shows the Amiga storage devices in a windows explorer
panel when you have the Amiga connected via either serial or ethernet. You
can transfer disk images as-is, and then run a program on the Amiga to
create a real floppy disk from that image. Alternatively, you can copy the
disk image to a virtual floppy device and then use it directly from the AmigaOS.
Granted, the Amiga has a HDD and much more RAM than an 880KB floppy...
Granted, I recently returned to school (part-time) after a 15 year
hiatus, and instead of going for a Comp Sci degree, I decided upon a Comp
Engineering degree.
IMHO, you definitely made the right choice! I did Comp Sci straight out of
high school, and found myself bored-as-batshit writing insurance
applications - uggh!! After 4 years I couldn't take it any more and went
back part-time to study Elec Eng. After 7 years part-time study - how I wish
I had made that choice first!! You learn the software basics in EE anyway
and obviously the rest of the course is far and above anything they teach
you in Comp Sci - and much, much more fun because you get to tinker with
projects exactly like you describe!
Regards,
--
| Mark McDougall | "Electrical Engineers do it
| <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> | with less resistance!"