Subject: standardization

From: Clifford Stein <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 16:24:06 PDT

I've been reading about all of the recent mail about standardization
ideas and want to express my concerns.

Standardization is fine and I would like some sort of hardware device as
long as it would be guaranteed to work on my machine (an ST).  Most
importantly, though, I want any hardware developed to be cheap.  I'm a
student and I don't have any full time jobs, tools, or lots of free time to
build/test/finance complex circuits.  I bought myself a glove because a
friend told me of "karazm" and Toys R Us was having a sale on them.  A
simple hardware thingie that just converts the bit stream into a byte stream
for the printer port would be easy to do (just a clock and a
serial-in/parallel-out circuit pretty much, right?).  I think I could even
design something like that myself, if I knew the timing schematics (i.e. for
how many usecs the latch/clocks/data lines stay on/off and such).  Or,
perhaps a little hardware interface that lets me plug it into my RS232 port
and let the computer read the bits coming in.  Either of these would leave
the CPU more free to do other things without worrying about dropping bits.
It would be, most importantly to me, cheap.  I don't particularly care about
standardization, i.e. upwards/backwards compatibility between different
devices and such.  Why not just wait to see if anything else comes out
instead of planning for something that mightn't happen, unless you are thinking
of existing devices like the "U-force" hand thingie?

Also, I've been working on an interrupt-driven assembly version of
"manfredo's" Hires source code for the ST.  Has anyone done this? (I don't
really want to duplicate the effort).  I don't know if I will ever finish
because I do have classes to worry about over here.  However, I wouldn't
mind suggestions, advice, comments or criticism from those who have done
things like this before.

--Cliff Stein
-------------
[email-masked]   |  "Ted Striker?  Never heard of him.  Wait!
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