23 Jun
1997
23 Jun
'97
2:13 a.m.
On Sun, 22 Jun 1997, A.R. Duell wrote:
Maybe for you. I find it a lot easier to solder up a card (which has a
good chance of working first or second time...) than to write and debug
software. In all my recent projects the hardware (quite complex hardware
- 10's of chips) has taken a lot less time than the (minimal) software.
This is true, but if you want to do strange
things with PC (or any other)
hardware then design the card you need. It's not that hard, and it won't
affect the machine's performance in other areas.
But its much faster and easier to do it with software. One of the things that made the Apple so nice was that it was an
excellent
prototyping machine. You had all sorts of inputs and outputs with which
to play with. You didn't need to spend time designing an interface card,
the Apple was experimenter ready! Just add software.
The standard I/O (on the games port) consisted of (IIRC) a few
resitor-reading ADCs, a few single-bit inputs and a few outputs. Not a lot
IMHO. The BBC micro had 8 I/O lines, another 8 outputs if you didn't use
the printer port, handshake lines for all those, 4 ADC channels (10 bit, I
think) _and_ a system bus with a couple of decoded chip select signals on
it. That's what I call an experimenter's machine.
And is it that hard to design an address decoder? It's one chip these
days, probably 2 or 3 at the time the Apple 2 was 'current'
Sam
--
-tony
ard12(a)eng.cam.ac.uk
The gates in my computer are AND,OR and NOT, not Bill