24 Jul
2010
24 Jul
'10
6:31 p.m.
On 24 July 2010 22:27, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
[USB-Centronics adpaters]
I was thinking of stuff like mid-1990s parallel printers being
auto-identified by PnP through a USB-Parallel adapter, by all of
Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. So clearly some 2-way comms are
occurring.
They work *remarkably* well with even old
printers, in my experience,
That's not too suprising. The Centronics interfaec was pretty well
standardised, and it's fairly simple anyway... I wouldn't expect them to do GCR (most PC internal
controllers can't).
But I suspect they can't do FM (single density) either. Can they handle
250kbps (360K, 720K) or 300kbps (360k disks in a 1.2M dribe basically)
data rates? Or do they assume tat everything is an HD 3.5" disk?
Not tried. I believe 720K PC disks work, and by extension Atari ST
disks, and possibly most things written by a WD FD controller chip,
but getting clever doesn't.
I have some "naughty" block-duplicated 360K 3.5" disks - imaged off
5.25" media onto 3.5" for archiving. That's an "illegal" format -
40-track DSDD 3.5" media never existed on the PC-compatibles, AFAIK.
I'd be interested to know if they'd work on a USB floppy. Someday, I
will try.
But it's worse than that. Things that I can do
(and do do) on my 80x86 PC
are not so easy to do on modern machines.
What x86 kit do you run?
--
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