Re: Hardware musings

["Justin England" <justin@rapidcity.net>]

"Lyrical Nanoha" wrote ...
> On Sat, 14 Oct 2006, BLuRry wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Lyrical Nanoha wrote:
>>> Just been thinking while we're on the topic, mightn't we need to have an
>>> actual 6502-class CPU somewhere in the loop for timing reasons? This 
>>> would
>>> essentially turn the disk ][ / Unidisk into something more like a 1541
>>> though.

A 6502 needn't be in the loop, just something capable of doing the timing 
required by the disk ][.  But yes, it would turn the disk to into nothing 
more than a  USB device connected to a PC.  What keeps me thinking that it 
could be done, is that only "half" the disk ][ interface needs to be 
"emulated"  since it doesn't need to talk to an a2.

>>
>> My point is this: why emulate the disk drive, except to support
>> nibble-copied disks?  If dealing with prodos, it seems much simpler to
>> use a CFFA card on a //e or //gs, and a serial-based storage device
>> that uses a modified rwts to drive data thru the serial port for the
>> //c (basically, a2 game server in embedded form)
>
> I was talking more about hooking a disk drive to a PC, eliminating the 
> need for a full Apple in the loop.
>
> -uso.

Who doesn't have a spare Apple 5.25 drive lying around? Just keep it 
permanently connected to a PC for the purpose of creating disks.  Although 
it would be nice to have a serial link between my //c and a PC with some 
sort of ProDOS driver that sees the serial port as an interface to an "HD". 
A windows program on the PC would then act like the HD.

Justin