[Coco] Prototype cartridge board?
Don Barber
don at dgb3.net
Sat Aug 6 22:26:30 EDT 2022
Hi folks,
I recently soldered together my own Altair 8800
(https://barberd.medium.com if you're interested). Part of that involved
building a Serial IO board
(http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/Serial%20IO%20Board/Serial%20IO%20Board.htm)
that includes a DLP-USB245R (https://www.dlpdesign.com/usb245r-ds-v10.pdf).
Using this USB module on the Altair is working so well for me that now
I'm considering building a CoCo cartridge with one. The USB protocol
takes care of all the speed/parity/stop settings so no need to worry
about that anymore, and the module itself can buffer quite a bit of
data, freeing up the CPU from needing to constantly poll the serial port
to not lose data. And one doesn't need to deal with usb-rs232 adapters
for the modern PC side of things; it just a straight cable and shows up
as a new COM device in Windows or ttyUSBX device in Linux.
I think I can make it mostly-compatible with the Deluxe RS232 Pak with
not much effort. I say mostly-compatible as the module does not have an
equivalent to the local echo configuration available on the RS232 Pak's
6551 chip. One could recreate that behavior with a bunch more logic
chips and a register chip but it doesn't seem worth it.
As such, i'm wondering if there is any source for a prototyping board
for the coco 40 pin cartridge port? What do you hardware hackers use
when playing with a design for a new cartridge-based peripheral for the
coco?
I was thinking something like this:
http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/Prototype%20Board/Prototype%20Board.htm
(scroll all the way to the bottom for the latest design) of course with
the right 40-pin connector instead of the S-100 connector.
If it turns out such is not available, and I'm not informed of a better
way to go about things: were I to design such a prototyping board and
order a run, would others be interested in getting in on the order?
Don
PS: Listened to the recent CocoTalk segment talking about my RSA
program. I suppose I should be proud that it ended with an 'ASPARAGUS!!!' ?
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