[ColorForth] USB and other serial bit boffing

[Roger Ivie <IVIE@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Myron Plichota wrote:
> The only relatively simple idea I have right now that may rescue the noti=
> on=20
> of casual invention on the PC is to develop a PCI card that provides=20
> equivalent and hopefully better I/O than the past 

Such things are available, but they're hard to find and expensive.

> and limit the software=20
> hurdle to mastering the art of PCI bus interfacing. Note that this does n=
> ot=20
> solve the problems involved with dealing with the gazillion different=20
> motherboard chipsets, 

The PCI BIOS is supposed to handle a lot of this for you. On those
occasions where I've had to do PCI work on a PC, I have been able to
use the PCI BIOS to find the address range assigned to the card I was
using. It wasn't difficult, but I don't have example code lying around
just at the moment.

> VGA color text mode 3 (inherited at disk boot time), and LBA ATA ...
> Of course, one needs a spare=
> hard drive to play with, perhaps a tiny, orphaned 200 MB unit ;)

Hmm. All of _my_ orphaned 200MB units are too old to understand LBA
mode...

> I can contibute the DOS utility I have written (in NASM) to overwrite an =
> LBA=20
> hard disk from the MBR onwards with a binary file if anyone wants it. It =
> is=20
> hardcoded to use a fixed filename and runs off of a standard DOS 6.2 or W=
> in95=20
> system-formatted floppy. It can be easily modified by anyone with NASM.

This sounds like a generally useful utility. I've been trying to convince
a friend that he should look at creating a fixed file within a FAT file
system to contain his data so he doesn't have to deal with FAT; once he
knows the address of the start of the file, he can just start writing
data and worry about finding the end of the data when he moves the disk
to a PC to extract the data.

Previous versions of his system wrote ANSI-labelled 8mm tape, which is
simple and straightforward and you can pop the tapes out and copy the
data off onto your VAX with no problem. These days folks want to copy
the data to a Winders PC instead, which means A) no tape drive standards
so you either have to write a bunch of Winders tape-manipulation software
or just use disks and 2) using disks means you have to deal with FAT in 
some manner. This sort of scheme would allow him to treat the disk as 
simply as he used to treat the tape.

I don't suppose you have a web page somewhere where you can post it?
-- 
Roger Ivie
ivie@xxxxxxxxxx
------------------------

To Unsubscribe from this list, send mail to Mdaemon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with:
unsubscribe ColorForth
as the first and only line within the message body
Problems   -   List-Admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Main ColorForth site   -   http://www.colorforth.com