Has anyone thought about making a new serial interface card for the ][ bus? It doesn't seem like it would be a hard thing to stick a uart, a canned 1.8432MHz oscillator, one of those max232 line buffer/driver chips, and a small eprom on a small card these days. A uart like a 6551 or 6851 (or ugh! even a 16550) ought to make the firmware easy. I know of at least one place (expressPCB) that provides free software that lets you lay out a card and then they etch them for you, cheap, and supposedly double sided and through-hole plated, too. Can you etch edge connectors on those things?
I know, I know, you can probably still get an SSC on ebay, but where's the challenge in that?
Try e-mail http://www.a2retrosystems.com/ he is always doing things like this..
There may not be a challenge in buying an SSC on eBay, but there is the ease and cheap price of doing so. If you feel like you want to create a new I/O card, why not try to design something new, like a USB card, or a card to use PC game controllers on an Apple II? Or design a SCSI card, which is quite a bit more expensive than an SSC.
It just seems pointless to create something so common. It would be like making an 80 column card.
Chris
Yeah, i know the challenge-factor w/a serial card would be low; doing a serial card would just be 'proof of concept' that you could make a card in the first place.
What would really be worth doing would be something that you could plug USB drive type devices (esp. flash/thumb drives) into, and just PR#7 your way into a booted ][ .. thereby eliminating reliance on klunky old floppies or hard drives. With a thumb drive, you wouldn't even have any moving parts. That would only leave dried up old electrolytics to deal with
Definitely. See:
http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppleII&c=projects/CFforAppleII/main.php
i wouldn't mind a 802.11b card
they're not that cheap on ebay -- like $20. probably less than anyone's time is worth, but I'd rather make one than buy one -- and need one. Let me know if you're interested in comparing notes on this.