Received: from JARTHUR.CLAREMONT.EDU by karazm.math.UH.EDU with SMTP id AA22612 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Tue, 22 Oct 1991 18:28:55 -0500 Message-Id: <199110222328.AA22612@karazm.math.UH.EDU> Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 16:24:06 PDT From: Clifford Stein To: glove-list@karazm.math.uh.edu Subject: standardization 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 ------------- cliff@jarthur.claremont.edu | "Ted Striker? Never heard of him. Wait! cliff@jarthur.uucp | That's not exactly true. We were like ...uunet!jarthur!cliff | brothers." cstein@hmcvax.bitnet | --Buck Murdoch