CompuServe Messages

John, Yah, I don't understand why all home gadgets don't have a standard controller port (of whatever protocol/type). Worse, when they _do_ have a port, they rarely are willing to give any info out. Makes me crazy, too ;-). Side story: the original 3-piece cd-i players (disc, computer, expansion) connected the drive/computer like this: the computer used a 1200 baud serial port to tell the drive which track/sector to read. The drive then shot that info back into the computer over a data line. So we had a cool idea for development work (where it's important to use your target player for testing instead of the "real" computer you're developing with)… we'd make a small controller which took the 1200 baud request, and which would then read a logical sector from a shared SCSI HD (1-gigabyte) and shoot it into the cd-i computer via a par/serial data line… thus allowing realtime emulation of a "homemade" CDROM. We got into this because most cd-i title places are backed with millions of dollars, and we figured this would go over big. We even got a preliminary order for two boards for $40K. (nice market, eh? 😉 Unfortunately everyone in the biz got the same idea at the same time :-(. So much for that. Our first and only foray into cd-i land. I bring this up because someone may want to do a similar gizmo for CDTV. After all, you'd do development work on a 68030-equipped A2000/3000 (unless you're a masochist), but would need to do testing on as real a CDTV (A500 plus CDROM drive) environment as possible. Something to think about. – kev