please don't laugh at my ignorance, but I've been "brainstorming" about
the M100s ports, and came up with some probably ridiculous
questions/ideas. Maybe someone more capable will get a spark of
inspiration from them.
So, awhile back I lamented the uni-directional nature of the parallel
port. Someone asked why I would care, what I'd use it for, and I had no
answer.
On ebay I've been following a Tandy 1100FD (I'd prefer the HD, but those
are rarer; wonder if I could stick an HD in the FD?). I was trying to
find out if its screen was sunlight readable, as I've been wanting one
for years, thinking it would be useful as a multi-environment machine.
Then I realized that, as floppies are aging and getting hard to find,
that would limit its usefulness. What if I replaced the floppy with a
Zip drive? Wait... it has a parallel port... I could get an external zip
drive!
And then I remembered my M100 and parallel port lament. So, if the
parallel port weren't strictly output, and therefore printer-only, I
could attach a Zip drive to it. But, if it were that simple, lots of
people would have done it already.
Then, for some reason I thought of the BCR port, which is input only,
AND trips an interrupt. Could one of the clever hardware types come up
up with a cable/device that plugs into both parallel and BCR, and adapts
the two of them into some kind of communication port? Maybe to connect a
zip drive, maybe as an alternate form of BlueM...?
Another thought came; could one of the clever guys convert the modem
into a "null-modem" device? Or maybe convert it into a second serial
port? (Then I remembered that the rs232/modem are either/or).
What about the cassette port? I pictured a device the size of a
cigarette pack or smaller that plugs into the cassette port, and takes
an SD card, or microSD, and emulates a cassette tape player (I've got a
converter in my car that lets me use the car's stereo with my
phone/music player). It would be a storage device like NADSBox, but
leaves the serial port free. (and if the cassette port could be accessed
internally w/o permanently changing the m100, it'd be even more portable).
Anyway, I hope all that verbiage inspires someone else's ideas for
hardware for the M100...
