[Coco] Re: atari USB device

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 12:56, Mark McDougall wrote:
> John R. Hogerhuis wrote:
> 
> > Well if we get USB storage working, why not just convert the disks to
> > floppy images on flash drive or 3.5" USB floppy drive, or USB hard
> > drive, and not hook up the 5.25"?
> 
> I thought it'd be pretty cool to be able to use a USB flash stick as a CoCo 
> hard disk - you could carry around your entire CoCo collection in your 
> pocket! Imagine turning up to a CoCo meet, plugging a flash stick into 
> someone else's machine, and having your own CoCo setup at your fingertips!
> 

As Mark says you can do something similar *today* with a CF card and
Cloud-9 hardware.

Hopefully we'll be able to make the USB key drives work too, if only
because it's fun, cool, and we'll learn a lot.

> Having said that, I can see that a (USB) PC keyboard would increase your 
> productivity - I know I have trouble adapting to different keyboards.

Well the keyboard idea is nice, but I think it is being done first
mainly because the Atari guys already implemented it so it should be
easy to get going and we can see something working. Same goes for
joysticks. The mouse will be more useful, and that should be second,
again, an easy one to do.

>  As for 
> USB floppy drives - I don't see the need for re-implementing 5.25" drives 
> (why wouldn't you just use an existing controller?) but it'd be handy for 
> using 'non-standard' drives such as 3.5" etc.
> 

Yeah, not sure but I think all these USB storage devices work the same,
hard drive, flash, floppy drives. We'll see.

> Of course, USB ethernet is also a pretty interesting option. Anyone feel 
> like porting Samba to the CoCo? ;) Or bluetooth? ;)

SMB! You'll never cram that beast into the coco.

But simpler things like FTP, email, http can be made to work fairly
easily.

As far as Ethernet, I'd like to see a simple USB<->RS232 adapter working
before diving into Ethernet adapter.

> 
> Regards,