[Coco] the bit-banger

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 11 July 2008, Chuck Youse wrote:
>Does anybody _really_ use this in a *S9 setup? 

ATM I am Chuck. I needed a printer & you can't buy one that understands ascii 
now for several years.  So I grabbed a usb<->serial adapter and a couple of 
long usb extension cables, and I'm feeding /p to this box at 9600 baud, where a 
script watches that usb port and collects the data.  When the data stops, it 
turns around and sends it to lp3, which is a 110 dollar brother laser printer 
sitting on the top shelf of the coco's desk.

Sort of Rube Goldburgish, but it worked till a lightning strike right on top of 
me sent a surge, and the coco isn't on the same power leg as everything in this 
room is, so it blew the adapter.  I bought some more just like it, but somehow 
that one is sending trash and I haven't had the time to scope it out and see 
if /p is still at 9600 baud, I had to play with tuneport because it was closer 
to 15kbaud originally.

>I'm sorely tempted to 
>disconnect the interrupt line (SERINT) from the GIME chip in my system
>and hook it to the cartridge port so I can generate FIRQ* from the
>expansion bus... and no, I can't just tie the interrupt to FIRQ*
>directly, I need a means to enable/disable the interrupt individually.
>The ability to dynamically change it between FIRQ* and IRQ* is also
>ridiculously useful (for the FDC anyway).

>Mind you, _I_ don't use the bit-banger (I use a UART for RS-232, use of
>the bit-banger REALLY eats CPU cycles), but I'd rather find the
>least-intrusive mod for others who might want to use this FDC ..
>
>I'll also see if using the interrupt mechanism on PIA1 is feasible.
>
>C.
>
>
>
>--
>Coco mailing list
>Coco at maltedmedia.com
>http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco



-- 
Cheers, Gene
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