On 3/16/2022 at 8:23 AM, Lorin Millsap said:
The good news is that even though little work has been done on testing the IEC functionality, on the X16 side it is purely a software issue. So in theory the various fast loader techniques can all be supported. But yes, since the SD2IEC doesn’t really support running custom code it is the more limited option.
Hi, Lorin - it's good to see you back.
Yes, the SD2IEC is limited, in its way, but that is not a limitation for a new system. There's no reason to run arbitrary drive code on the Commander's IEC drive, since we can design the protocol correctly the first time around, and an (hypothetical) 8X JiffyDOS would be more than fast enough to fill main memory in less than 1 second.
I've been experimenting a little with the Raspberry Pi Pico. It's cheap enough in quantity that it would be perfect as the base for an IEC drive, and it shouldn't require too much work to port over the existing SD2IEC codebase. Given the choice between that and having to build a brand new codebase from scratch, this seems like the logical choice.