At 10:03 PM 7/15/98 +0200, you wrote:
>So, what we need is something that hardly requires extra hardware. Luckily,
>MSX has really nice joystickports, which can do much more than that. They
>have 2 (or 3, I don't remeber exactly) outputs, and 5 inputs. It shouldn't
>be too hard to wire this to the PC'es parallel port, since all you need
>is... wire! (and 2 connectors) So, we only need some software. The main
>problem here is the actual data-transfer, but since we have at least 2
>inputs on our MSX it's possible to make a synchronate-signal and one
>databit-signal. I think it's even possible to make this in pure BASIC on
>the MSX. The PC-part is perhaps not as easy, but someone who has used the
>hardware directly won't have any trouble making this to. When things are
>made in assembly on MSX, perhaps we can get a reasonable transfer-rate.
The PC part is probably easier than the MSX part, because you can use a
language like Pascal or C to write the software and it will still be fast
enough.
But transfer rate doesn't depend just on the speed of the software... Both
ICs and wires introduce delays. Does anyone know how fast an average MSX
joystick port is?
Is the MSX parallel port bidirectional? If so, it would be ideal for data
communication.
>An other possiblity is, as I've mentioned before, the MIDI ports of PC and
>MSX, but this requires extra hardware.
Also, MIDI will give you a low transfer rate. Enough for multiplayer games,
too low for file transfers. And for multiplayer games the joystick
connection is good enough.
>So, if somebody would think about transferring files using the joystickport
>and LPT port (perhaps even a toke-bus network using both joystickports?
>wha!)
If you connect your joystick port 1 to one MSX and port 2 to another, you
don't get a token bus network. The reason it's called token bus is that
there is one bus for all nodes (computers) and the one who has the token is
allowed to send.
Bye,
Maarten
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