Commander X16

14 hours ago, m00dawg said:

This peaked my interest. I'm not sure what you mean by bench computer? Are you referring to using the X16's GPIOs to do logic probing kinda stuff or something else?

Yes, running the User port lines out to a breadboard to talk to microcontrollers or microcontroller petipherals. Bringing up a tethered Forth in a small microcontroller is one example.

And before people jump in and say, "no, the way you do it is this way with these software tools", I'm going to point back to where I said, " not everyone will want to" ... a lot of people are happy with the tottering piles of tools on development environments that run on dlls from other development environments talking to proprietary drivers, but those who are not thrilled by that approach exist. Indeed, it's almost guaranteed that if there is a mainstream approach, there will be pockets of people who are not enamored with the mainstream.

 

15 hours ago, Cyber said:

@BruceMcF Valid points. I also might need some od them sometimes.

What I meant, aren't we exagguratng things?

I mean, serial is fine for most of these cases. And swapping SD card someties should not wear it off.

I'm not declining anything. I just felt discussion on the topic somewhat pushy. And reasons are not that vital.

Well, I am guessing that if the C64 could bit bang serial to 2400baud, the CX16 will certainly be able to hit 9600baud, maybe 19200baud.

There are lots of things wher 19200 is plenty fast enough, but I had a home internet connection on a second landline in the late 90s, and there are that situations where 56kbps is annoyingly slow. Backing up the SD card is one of those, and if I have to swap out the SD card to back up while developing, I'm going to end up doing fewer backups than I should.

Actually, for back up, even a standard Centronics parallel port would be fine, as the data is going one way, so some input status lines to handshake would be enough. That eliminates worry about the USB to Parallel port cable drivers working correctly in EPP mode.

As far as policing the tone of posts, I reviewed the thread and don't see the pushy post. Maybe you could quote the post you are reading as pushy. All I see is people talking through potential optional add ons for a project they are interested in. Indeed, I don't know who there is TO push, given that nobody is saying the project team should be doing any of this. Even the posts that were not aware that a bit banged serial port is planned were not clamoring for the project team to add X or Y chip yo fill the gap.

8 hours ago, BruceMcF said:

Yes, running the User port lines out to a breadboard to talk to microcontrollers or microcontroller petipherals. Bringing up a tethered Forth in a small microcontroller is one example.



And before people jump in and say, "no, the way you do it is this way with these software tools", I'm going to point back to where I said, " not everyone will want to" ... a lot of people are happy with the tottering piles of tools on development environments that run on dlls from other development environments talking to proprietary drivers, but those who are not thrilled by that approach exist. Indeed, it's almost guaranteed that if there is a mainstream approach, there will be pockets of people who are not enamored with the mainstream.



 

Yeah I thought this is what you may have been referring to. It could be more fun to use than say the Arduino IDE's serial monitor and such. Could even perhaps do simple graphing of logic states? One of the 6502 computers David reviewed had some nice to haves for this sort of thing, really bridging the gap between microcontroller and computer in a cool way. I think this would be a wonderful use of the X16 myself, yep!

If this is about getting software onto, and data off of, the X16 from (for example) a PC, without reaching around to the back of the X16 to get at the SD slot and saving wear and tear on the card and the slot... aren't there a bunch of X1541 derivatives out there with IEC on one end and variously parallel, 9-pin serial, or even USB on the other end?

This could free up the X16's user port for modem or printer connections.

12 hours ago, kelli217 said:

If this is about getting software onto, and data off of, the X16 from (for example) a PC, without reaching around to the back of the X16 to get at the SD slot and saving wear and tear on the card and the slot... aren't there a bunch of X1541 derivatives out there with IEC on one end and variously parallel, 9-pin serial, or even USB on the other end?



This could free up the X16's user port for modem or printer connections.

Certainly. Horses for courses. Someone with a UART on an expansion card may have the User Port free. Someone with a card with 2 VIAs on it can have a full parallel port, a two serial shift register serial port that should conservatively support 38.4kbps, and still have the user port free plus something like 16 free GPIO. Someone connecting to an EPP device on the User Port without any expansion cards might be looking for the fastest & cheapest way to use the IEC port for the job.

One thing I have zero interest in trying to recreate is my daisywheel printer that sounded like a submachine gun with a silencer, but the EPP box on the User Port, I do have some interest in that. So flexibility in options is appealing.

 

Right - and just know that I’m not completely up to speed with what’s currently in the works for communications, be they serial or parallel or other.  All I know at the moment is that there’s an IEC port.

As for development:  even with the emulator, I’m doing all the development on my Mac, and then booting up the emulator for testing.  So, yeah, I would like wire transfer at any speed.  ANY speed, just about.

 

IF it’s only for software testing, then no transfer speed is needed, because most of the work is on the emulator, and one SD swap per hour probably doesn’t matter.

IF there is hardware testing involved — i.e. a card — then it might ought to do better.

Now then, if I can run a 1581 IEC burst-mode emulator on my Mac, so much the better.

Now I want to turn back to IEC.

Will the X16 will be able to use Burst mode when talking to things like 1571s and 1581s?

 

1 hour ago, rje said:

Right - and just know that I’m not completely up to speed with what’s currently in the works for communications, be they serial or parallel or other.  All I know at the moment is that there’s an IEC port.



As for development:  even with the emulator, I’m doing all the development on my Mac, and then booting up the emulator for testing.  So, yeah, I would like wire transfer at any speed.  ANY speed, just about.



 

The word on having bit banged serial was when the UART on the Vera was dropped because they needed the pins for more register addressing. If the board is now booting up, hopefully they can start work on that so we'll know what speed we are talking about. But for testing device drivers and such in hardware, 9600bps 1.2KB/s, so 16KB in around 13 seconds, and it might be 19200bps, so 16K in under 7 seconds.

The Centronics parallel is just the pinout given of the User Port on the second prototype board ... I wouldn't automatically expect Kernel code to support that, but the VIA pins connected would mostly support an EPP parallel port. But at 8MHz, even if it was 50 clocks per byte, that's 160KB/s..

Now I want to turn back to IEC.
Will the X16 will be able to use Burst mode when talking to things like 1571s and 1581s?
 

Yes and no. It’s wired up such that it can. But at the moment there are no burst routines.


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3 hours ago, Lorin Millsap said:

Yes and no. It’s wired up such that it can. But at the moment there are no burst routines.

Thanks!  Good enough.

And Bruce says:

Quote

But for testing device drivers and such in hardware, 9600bps 1.2KB/s, so 16KB in around 13 seconds, and it might be 19200bps, so 16K in under 7 seconds.

Even 9600 bps is good enough; more is gravy. 

Thank you both for answering.