Nasta, thank you for taking the time to write this - wonderful information!
On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 3:09 AM, Z N <[email protected]> wrote: > Maximum data throughput on 10Base ethernet approaches about 800-900k > bytes/second. Well, the good thing is that it takes around 0.1s to fill up the main memory of the original hardware at this speed :) Anyway, seriously speaking - what I really had in mind is a replacement for the PPP over serial connection setup which I currently run. Main use for me would be non-throughput intensive applications like a small web server, web clients and interactive applications like telnet. > less than half if it's done by an ordinary 68008 CPU. Unless a very simple > communication protocol was adopted, the ethernet would run quite slow and > while doing that, bog down the CPU considerably. I agree, that's why I thought a microcontroller based board would be optimal, essentially hooking up a more powerful cpu to do the heavy lifting and leave a very thin driver layer on the ql side. This guy has a nice writeup which might serve as one possible starting point: http://www.tuxgraphics.org/electronics/200606/article06061.shtml > that a packet has been sent or received. Here we get back to the > inadequacies of the ROM port - no interrupt line. There is one on the > expansion port Based on all the information from you and Miguel the expansion port definitely looks like the way to go. > DSMCL can over-ride any decoding internal to the QL, on ANY address. This was really interesting stuff that defnitely was not in the documents I found so far. > which are actually used by the software to access these registers - if I > recall correctly, it's 64 bytes at the very beginning, starting from address > 18000. "The Sinclair QDOS companion" seems to agree with you :) > However, the choice of address is not straight-forward. Hardware like the > TC, GC, SGC use some addresses in this area to decode their own on-board > hardware. Unfortunately I do not recall off the top of my head exactly which > ones but something about the top 256 bytes rings a bell. Hopefully someone has the details on the addresses in use by those. > 3) Mimic the OS initialization scheme using the initialization data normally > found at the beginning of a (presumed) ROM in the ROM slot. It may be > possible to do this by manipulating register values passed in the > initialization of the external interface, but I would not recommend it as > the init code is different in various OS versions - besides, what the OS > does on init is quite well documented and not too difficult to emulate, so > better keep things clean and compatible. There seems to be a writeup on this in "The Sinclair QDOS Companion". Don't know if the procedure outlined there still applies with the newer ROMs, etc. > Done! With your instructions, easy as pie :) Cheers, Petri _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
