is it possible to add a serial port to sprinter? i would like to connect sprinter to another machine (or another sprinter) (or an external modem and so on).

i was surprised to see no serial port on this machine. can altera fix it? :)

Sprinter has serial ports of original format Z80SIO. But Sprinter use these ports for input signals only (one for keyboard, another for mouse). Adding another fulness serial ports is possible with external card, but it is expensive way.
And what about parallel port (like LPT 1)? Today we prepare the necessary documentation for programming Sprinter's parallel ports

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PETERS PLUS LTD

May I use ISA-8 multicard with parallel and serial ports in Sprinter?


Alexander Shabarshin (shaos@mail.ru)

May be, if you will have software support. We have not ISA-8 multicard and can't test it.

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PETERS PLUS LTD

that's wonderful, but what I need is Input/Output port. Without those ports your machine is useless to me, as i cannot connect it to my network nor to my external modem.
I'm was under impression that you could implement that very functionality in SPRINTER using ALTERA chip or whatever.

try use ISA USB card from Cypress SL811HS developer kit. This card working in non DMA mode, and have open source (for noncommercial only) for simple drivers for host/slave modes.

the isa cards also have to support 8 bit operation. does this usb card do that?

yes, it must, SL811HS have 8 bit data bus, but really it depended of PAL chip (U103 on schematic).
But it is not seriously problem. USB chips have simply bus (intel like) and in our adapter we directly connected chip to arm mcu bus. Prime cost for our USB device adaptor was about $20 (we made it in verysmall quantities).

very interesting! $20 should be a managable cost as well. i guess then the biggest problem is somehow managing to incorporate support in the operating system. i wonder if there are usb drivers for dos around (ms-dos seems to be somewhat similar to the sprinter operating system) and if so, how they manage to get it working...

see their site http://www.scanlogic.com
Products: Embedded Hosts

look SL811HS page. There also sources for host/slave debuger for DOS/Windows and example in asm of slave device with i51 mcu and SL811H as USB peripheral chip (slave mode). This asm example (for i51) must be easy porting to z80 asm for running Sprinter in slave mode, and PC as host.