"Locking Connector Kits" for LocalTalk

From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre_at_stockholm.ptloma.edu>
Date: Mon Jan 7 21:55:20 2002

> > Today, I received my neat-o thing for the week, an ISA card for
> > LocalTalk, the software, and an Apple LocalTalk Locking Connector Kit
> > for DB-9

> Which brand of card? Got a picture? Vendor name?

Gen-yew-ine Apple LocalTalk "PC Card" M2313/A.

> > Elation rapidly turned to consternation when I realised the connector box
> > doesn't take the PhoneNET wiring, of which I have scads, but rather the
> > annoying Apple four-conductor locking-style cables.
>
> But if you have a DE-9 PhoneNET adapter, that should go on your ISA
> card just fine. Pre-DIN8 Macs had a DE9F for serial.

Who would carry those? That would indeed take care of the whole problem.
Fry's still has PhoneNET boxes but I don't think they have the DE-9
variety.

> Mac DE9 serial pinout is not the same as the PC-AT serial pinout. In
> addition, I expect that the chip in your SwiftLink is some flavor of
> ACIA (6850 and the like) as opposed to a 8250/16550 UART or (what's in
> a Mac) Z8530. The Z8530 is quite the chip - they appear in Macs, Suns
> and late-model COMBOARDs (we programmed them to speak HASP, 3780 and SNA).
> I am fairly certain that AppleTalk/LocalTalk depends on the abilities
> of the Z8530. While you could probably get another chip to squeeze out
> an AppleTalk frame, you'd have to cruft up the layer-1 stuff largely
> from scratch if you didn't use a Z8530 or some descendent.

I knew I'd have to start from scratch, but this makes the project seem
bigger than I'd like it to be :-/

The PC's card does indeed have a Z8530 on the board. But, bizarrely, it
also has a Rockwell R65C02. Does this give some hope, possibly, of stealing
the low-level code the on-board CPU is using to drive the Z8530 if I
could read off the EPROMs? The EPROM socket is labelled 2764 (hopefully
it's truthful).

-- 
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
 Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser_at_stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. -- Tacitus ---------
Received on Mon Jan 07 2002 - 21:55:20 GMT

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