[Coco] V.PAGE 46551 and 46552 drivers

[George Ramsower]

> On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:46:42 -0600, George Ramsower 
> <georgeramsower at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "L. Curtis Boyle" 
>> <curtisboyle at sasktel.net>
>>
>>>>
>>>     That may be true for disk controllers, but RS-232 does allow 
>>> multiple cards (the Comm-4 board from Alpha technologies had 4 ports, 
>>> as an example). The device descriptor determines it by the address of 
>>> the card, and each get's their own buffer (especially if using SACIA 
>>> for 6551 based ports, and DACIA for 6552 based ports). When we used to 
>>> run the Coco 3/Nitros9 system here at work, we had 3 parallel ports, 
>>> and 8 serial ports (4 6551, 4 6552 (2 ports per chip on the latter), 
>>> and we drove 8 ADM terminals from those.
>>>
>>
>>  Are the drivers and descriptors available for these chips? I've been 
>> wanting to build a new board for my coco using one of these chips to 
>> replace the 6551 chips I'm using now.
>>  My current board has three of the 6551 chips and from what I hear, the 
>> 46551 and 46552 are superior.
>>  I use stock OS-9 L2 on a 512K CC3.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> George
>
> Both SACIA and DACIA were part of Nitros9 at least up until 2.01, so I 
> assume the source should be with the current NitrOS9 project. Both were 
> originally done by Bruce Isted, and I don't recall too many changes being 
> done afterwards by any of us on the NitrOS9 team.
> Also, what I meant with "4 6551, 4 6552" is that we had 4 ports running 
> off of 6551 chips (4 chips; 1 port per chip), and 4 running off of 6552 
> chips (2 chips, 2 ports per chip, with up to 38.4kbaud and none of the 
> nasty bugs with date/DTR that the 6551's had). The 6552 was used in the 
> TC-9, and the Eliminator disk/hard drive/clock/parallel port/dual serial 
> port controller that Frank Hogg sold for the Coco. That was an excellent 
> controller, except for no RS-DOS compatibility, and it's use of obscure 
> (even at the time) WD-1002-05 controller cards (hope I got that last 
> number right; going from foggy memory here).
>
>
> -- 
> L. Curtis Boyle

 Thank you for being so kind with my stupidity. I was thinking of the chips 
from another mfg that works better. I think they have five digits in their 
nomenclature.

 I need to look into the 6552 and see if it is pin compatible.
 Perhaps I could just swap the chips if they are. .... assuming the drivers 
will work on those.
 Darn.. I still have about seven or eight of the 6551 chips left.

 The OS9 drivers work good up to about 9600 with the 6551 chips. Faster is 
always better!

George