Re: Handic VIC-Switch

Den Thu, 2 Nov 2017 12:25:54 +0100 skrev "Anders Carlsson"
<anders.carlsson@sfks.se>:
> smf wrote:
> 
> > How reliable do you want it, if two computers try to talk to two
> > seperate devices at the same time?
> 
> Interesting question, and perhaps the possible use cases should be
> defined before a design is made. I mean it is not like we're about to
> equip whole schools and offices with 8-bit Commodore gear starting in
> 2018. I understood the original intent was to hook up a couple of
> computers to a single drive (perhaps a HDD on the IEC bus) in your
> home environment. While you indeed could have visitors or run some
> software that accesses drives on its own, the idea of several
> computers and drives in some kind of star net perhaps never will
> exist.

Yes, that was about what I were thinking about.

I'll probably almost never use more than one computer at a time, so
at least in theory I could use a passive switch. However it would be
nice with a more high-tech automatic solution.

I could well live with burst devices running in non-burst mode if a
transfer is initiated while another computer uses the IEC bus. As I
understand it that's the only problem if we would detect every line on
the bus and switch fast enough if the bus is free when activity is
detected.
 

*(The machines I currently have is a C128, a VIC-20, a Plus/4 and one
of those zoomfloppy-ish interfaces. In a hypothetical distant future I
might build a homebrew interface for C= IEC bus for Sinclair ZX81 (yes,
there is schematics and ROM's available on the net ;) )).

> Feature creep can be a good thing as long as those are features that 
> actually are requested in real life, but orthogonally designing a
> system for every thinkable possibility that will make it more
> difficult to design, probably more expensive and take longer time as
> well, should be thought twice about.

IMHO it's good to feature creep onto a "do this if it's simple enough"
list. Then any feature that requires more than a small effort could be
dropped, while easily implemented features could be implemented even
though they would rarely be used or only bring a small value to the
user.


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