Re: C2N232 + cbmlink on a PET 3032 with Basic 2/4

From: Marko Mäkelä <msmakela_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2012 21:06:21 +0300
Message-ID: <20121015180621.GA4471@x220>
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 05:06:40PM +0200, Anders Carlsson wrote:
>It makes me wonder about a prlink or PC64 cable connected to the 
>userport, if the cbmlink driver for those cables has similar issues on 
>the 3032/4032.

Those should work better, as the user port lines should not be shared 
with tape or disk, at least not on the Vic-20 and C64. I do not remember 
if the PET user port lines are shared with anything. But, be careful 
about ground loops and avoid hot-plugging. The RS-232 at least pretends 
to have some protection, and I never fried a C2N232 except once when 
modifying the circuit board.

There were two main reasons why I developed the C2N232. One was that 
parallel port bitbanging was getting too tricky on modern operating 
systems, and the 'legacy interfaces' started to go away on modern 
hardware. (OK, on Linux and FreeBSD there are file interfaces for 
parallel port bitbanging, but on Windows this is more tricky.) While the 
RS-232 did go away too, there are some USB interfaces that do work if 
you pray nicely. :-)

The other reason was bootstrapping. I wanted to have an interface that 
works in the 'native' mode.

IMO, the sd2iec has solved the compatibility and bootstrapping issues 
nicely. It even supports sequential access to arbitrarily long files on 
the FAT file system (which I tested with a multi-megabyte file on the 
Vic-20). The only use case that sd2iec does not support nicely is 
software development. You have to switch SD cards in order to load a new 
version of the program. With a cable, you would just load the new 
program over the cable.

I guess you could try to have the best of two worlds, and develop a 
sd2iec that allows both IEC/IEEE and USB-storage (or USB MTP) access to 
the SD card. Has anyone played with the AT90USBKey or other boards?

	Marko

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Received on 2012-10-15 19:00:05

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