tensi@infovax (12/02/87)
Hello,
I have some questions concerning the AMIGA 2000 with JANUS 8088-card.
1. Is anyone at Commodore developping a method to use AMIGAs serial
port from the PC side? At the SYSTEMS fair Commodore people told me
they abandoned this project, because it's easy to plug in a card
into a free PC slot (I don't think this is a phantastic
argument...).
2. Is there any way to use the AMIGA-mouse as a PC mouse (I heard
Commodore is also working on that)? I would like to run MS-WINDOWS
and prefer mouse to keyboard interface.
If 2. doesn't work generally, maybe someone is writing a
message based AMIGA driver set for WINDOWS not just
emulating the CGA but using a 640x200 (or 640x256 PAL)
resolution with 32 colours and mouse support. (But even
mouse support for a CGA-screen would be fine...)
Don't flame me why I'm still using MS-WINDOWS. I think it's quite a
good package for IBM's and clones and we're also using those.
Thanks for your help
Thomas Tensi | E-Mail:
Institut fuer Informatik | tensi@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (X.400)
Technische Universitaet Muenchen | tensi%lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de@relay.cs.net (arpa/csnet)
Arcisstr.21 | tensi%lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de@unido.uucp (uucp)
8000 Muenchen 2 | tensi%lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de@ddoinf6.bitnet (bitnet)
West Germany daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) (12/22/87)
in article <36900002@infovax.UUCP>, tensi@infovax says: > Nf-ID: #N:infovax:36900002:000:1482 > Nf-From: infovax!tensi Dec 2 16:23:00 1987 > 1. Is anyone at Commodore developping a method to use AMIGAs serial > port from the PC side? At the SYSTEMS fair Commodore people told me > they abandoned this project, because it's easy to plug in a card > into a free PC slot (I don't think this is a phantastic > argument...). There is an intrinsic problem with emulating a PC serial port with the Amiga serial port. And that's speed. The PC BIOS wants to talk to an interrupt driven serial port chip at the register level. All it's going to get is an image in RAM. With sufficient buffering by an Amiga server task, the speed would be reasonable, but (I'm told, not being a PC expert) that PC serial devices wouldn't cooperate with such a scheme. The only other solution is shipping things over a byte at a time, and this would be faintly reminiscent of the C64 serial port in terms of maximum baud rates, I would expect. On the other hand, it would be rather easy to use the PC's 8088 as a dedicated server to a serial port and ship bytes into shared memory for an Amiga serial device to read, in a fully compatible fashion. That would, however, involve writing some PC side code, so this may scare off some people.... > 2. Is there any way to use the AMIGA-mouse as a PC mouse (I heard > Commodore is also working on that)? I would like to run MS-WINDOWS > and prefer mouse to keyboard interface. This could certainly be done, though I haven't seen it done yet. You'd need an input server on the Amiga side that could be told to intercept mouse events and feed them to shared RAM. On the PC side, a mouse driver would pick up those events very much like it would straight from a Microsoft mouse. This would be really nice incorporated into the Amiga's PC windowing software, but wouldn't necessarily have to exist there. > Thomas Tensi | E-Mail: -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga Usenet: {ihnp4|uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh "The B2000 Guy" PLINK : D-DAVE H BIX : hazy "I can't relax, 'cause I'm a Boinger!"