29 Nov
2007
29 Nov
'07
10:36 p.m.
Hi,
> OTOH At the company I worked for at the time, the
beige "wedge
>shaped" PSUs were dropping like flies - we found them to be
>HORRENDOUSLY unreliable....
pics? I'm not sure I recall a wedge-shaped PSU.
OK, look here: http://jope.fi/cbm/cbm/c64psu.jpg.
The PSU I'm referring to is the leftmost one of the three in that picture;
I've always called them "wedge shaped", but I suppose "cheese
block" would
be closer to the mark, LOL.
>....The paddle inputs (analogue in) and triggers
were handled by
>POKEY.
Was the trigger IO, or just input?
Just input AFAIR.
Thinking about it, I don't think the paddle inputs weren't "real"
analogue
inputs. Rather they timed how long a capacitor took to charge through the
pot inside the paddle controller.
If Atari only had 4 bits per port, You could still do
8 nybbles (4
bytes) of data and a SELect, or 2 bytes and SEL and CLK lines with both
ports across the two machines....
Quite, plenty of scope there too.
However, by the time I moved onto an 800XL (which only had 2 joystick ports)
Atari had given us the PBI expansion bus which made things vastly
easier....though it didn't stop me soldering another 6520 on top of the
already existing one and using one port for a centronics interface and the
other to drive a UART.... :-)
....What about TI or Apple?
My knowledge of those is sketchy at best - I have a couple of TI's and still
have at least one Apple ][ but haven't delved into the TI yet, nor have I
turned my Apple on for some 10 years!
TTFN - Pete.