31 Aug
2012
31 Aug
'12
12:37 p.m.
On 31 August 2012 19:55, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Good point, yes.
They were,
yes, but then again, there are SD and CF interfaces for
earlier devices such as the ZX Spectrum now, so it is doable.
I didn;t think the system bus was availabe on either of these machines.
SO making an adapter could be 'interesting'. Didn;'t the Z88 take memeory
cartridsges, though? A cartridge to take a flash card would eb intersting...
I did some trivial research into this.
The Z88 has proprietary carts using battery-backed RAM or EEPROM.
There are carts holding a whopping 1MB of RAM now, and a gig of Flash,
I think, but there is no way to interchange them with conventional
media readers.
The NC100 has a PCMCIA slot, but it can only take 1MB of SRAM and it
is used as RAM - there is no filesystem on it, so there's no way to
read it on anything else.
I have a reason for disliking USB here, and it's
got nothign to do with
the age of the interfaces. It's that USB is too 'asymmetirc'.
Let me expalin. With RS232, and posslby simpe null modem calbes, I can
link my M100, my HP95LX, my Eposn PX4, etc, etc, etc to my PC. I can a
also link them to each other. I can, for example, link an HP95LX to my PC
nad kermit an intel-hex file to progrma in to na EPROM. I can then take
that 95LX to my workbench and plug it into my EPROM programmer nad upload
the file. Or I can transfer the file to my M100. Or I can link the M100
striagn to the PC. Or to any of my otehr machines.
YOu simply can';t do that with USB. There is no way to link 2 USB mastes
or slaves together. USB gets round the problem of null-modme cables by
making them impossible, and prventing you from doing the thigns you
needed a null modem cable for with RS232.
Fair point. There are things like USB OTG but it's rarely implemented.
OTOH, I've never once wanted to do this...
How come I never have these sorts of problems? I
routinely link RS232
ports together had have no problems. Even on the fitst time of connecting
2 machiens, it often 'just works'
[...]
No ti's not. It makes those staks that the
manufacters intend you to do
-- plugging in the normal peripehrals -- easy, and other jobs, almost
impossible. Since I use computers in unconventional ways, I need to be
able to do the latter.
AS I said earlier, how come I naver have these sorts of problems?
I am not saying it's *impossible*. It works, very well in some cases,
and it was a long-lived, widely-adopted standard that is of very wide
use and applicability.
All that I am saying that I find it to be fiddly and irritating -- and
failure-prone until you get the settings right on both ends. I didn't
like it when it was current and I like it less now.
You thrive on such things, I am sure; my hateful administrivia is your
fun bit of fettling, and my fun bit of
fiddling - e.g. playing with non-traditional x86-32 OSs such as Haiku,
AROS and whatnot, installing multiple Linux distros, experimenting
with FreeBSD and Solaris and so on -- might well be your wretched
waste of time and effort.
--
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