Recent content by Tashtari

Hmmm. Will have to keep an eye out for one to come up for sale...

Interesting! I'd love to add that to the device list - there are some special questions that can be asked of mice, like which of the three possible protocol handlers they support. I'll message you about it shortly (been crazy busy lately...)

I haven't! I did get my hands on a JL Cooper Media Control Station at one point and RE its protocol, but it sounds like the two are quite different animals... the Media Control Station has a mode that sends proprietary ADB commands, but mostly it seems you program it to send keystrokes or mouse...

So one of the creators of the original ADB I/O has resurfaced and is selling five of them on ebay... bit rich for my blood at $280 starting bid, though. https://www.ebay.com/itm/198289571175 It's made me wonder, though, what ever happened to the board designs folks were working on? I'd be...

Turns out I'm wrong about this, Yellowstone seems like it's more its own thing, somewhere between the Liron card and the "Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller" (aka Superdrive) card. I'm not 100% sure, though... my primary interest is Macs, not Apple IIs, like I said, so I've got some considerable gaps...

...So I just realized something. This wasn't on my radar because my interest is in Macs and not Apple IIs, but the IWM is the heart of the Apple II "Liron" disk controller card. That means, with the addition of a boot ROM and some decoding logic, TashMachine could be used to produce an open...

I've done some shoring-up of the logic and feel comfortable blaming the remainder of the trouble I had before on my test setup. I've put the code up on github. Constructive criticism is welcomed - but as this is my first foray into HDL, please be gentle. =)...

Correct - the host tells TashTalk what node IDs it wants to use via the Set Node IDs command and TashTalk responds automatically to RTSes with CTSes and ENQs with ACKs for those node IDs, and likewise when sending data, the host just sends a data frame for TashTalk to deliver and TashTalk takes...

More like typical Apple "that computer is ten minutes old now, time to buy a new one", heh.

Well, the SWIM is a proper superset of the IWM, so if you put a SWIM in it, the Plus will just use it as an IWM and ignore the extra functionality. The ROM would have to be upgraded. (If anyone wants to put a PLCC44 SWIM in a DIP28 socket anyway, contact me, I have PCBs for this.) Also, I...

Actually, DCD support should come for free if the behavior of the IWM is being properly imitated. It's sort of misleading to say that DCD devices "pretend to be floppy drives", but, in a way, they do - they use the same communication channels as floppy drives do and, at the physical layer, the...

Maybe you'll have to start calling me the CPLD whisperer... then again, maybe not. Either way: Introducing... TashMachine! Elevator Pitch It's a behavioral clone of the Integrated Woz Machine, the ASIC that acts as the floppy controller in the Mac (and the Apple IIgs and IIc+, maybe...

I've been at work on this project again, and I think I might've gotten to the point of being code complete (though not yet perfectly functional). The current approach is targeting an ATF1508 using the Verilog→Quartus II→POF2JED workflow. I don't know how portable my Verilog code is, it makes...

Yeah, I don't know. I have zero experience with any aspect of Mac OS development. It's entirely possible, too, that the OS itself cheats and doesn't use a method that aftermarket software can exploit... In any case, it's likely that there are two halves to the question: what do you hook to...

So I've been thinking a little about bringing soft power to the ITXPlus... I didn't think the keyboard controller firmware could fit anything more in it, but it turns out I was wrong, and I've come up with a mechanism to let the PS/2 keyboard have control of the ITXPlus's power button...