Hi,
> There is a port marked "serial" on back. I'm guessing
>that all the periferals plug into this. Floppy drives
>and printer....
That's correct. Almost all peripherals attach to the "serial" connector, you
simply daisychain one peripheral off of the previous one.
There are a very few peripherals that connect to the cartridge port and
still fewer that connect to the user port - about the only thing I recall
that used the user port was a printer interface and CBM's own RS-232
"cartridge".
>....(Hmm... if the MPS-1200 is a serial printer, could one
>get a converter and plug it into a wyse 85 or vt220?)
Not if it attaches to the "serial" connector.
The "serial" bus is actually a bastardised implementation of the IEEE-488
bus, which CBM had used on the PET series. Data is transferred serially (at
300 baud) instead of in parallel, other than that I believe it's pretty much
IEEE.
>....The manual leads me to believe the serial port on a C-64
>isn't compatible w/ RS-232, however. :(
That's correct, however, the "user port" is able to emulate an RS-232 port
in software....BUT you need some external circuitry to buffer the signals
and convert them to RS-232 levels. As I mentioned above, CBM used to produce
such a unit and I'm sure many other companies did too. I built my own
buffer, all you need is a MAX-232 chip and a handful of resistors and
capacitors.
TTFN - Pete.
--
Hardware & Software Engineer. Sound Engineer.
Collector of Arcade Machines, Games Consoles & Obsolete Computers (esp DEC)
peter.pachla_at_wintermute.org.uk | www.wintermute.org.uk
--
Received on Wed Mar 15 2000 - 14:04:38 GMT