Odd ideas that I've had lately...

From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_30below.com>
Date: Fri Feb 7 00:31:00 2003

At 21:04 02/06/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>I was sitting at home reading my latest copy of Mouser (component catalog)

As I have done most recently... ;-)

> Palms and Visors...

I've had a somewhat different _psycho-wacky_ idea -- what would it take to
get OS-9/68K ported to the Palm? I have a Palm 3c with a partially dead
battery, twiddling it's thumbs, which would make a decent "play-palm"...

uClinux looks too bulky & slow, compared to OS-9...

Anyone here work for Radisys/MicroWare... Any chance they'd sell hobbyist
source licenses??? :-)

One bad thing with this is I did some googling earlier today (for sh*ts &
grins) and there's not a ton of info about the internals of the Palms
(things like memory maps, display access parameters, etc...) out there...

>...but the palm doesn't have built in USB or Ethernet or Serial,

Ahem, *all* the older Palms (up to & including the 3C) had built-in Serial,
and the newer ones have built-in USB... mind you, you need a Handspring
with it's built-in CF slot to get ethernet...

> you are stuck with a bulky add-on or a cradle...

Or just a cable... been on the open market for years... :-)

>...possibly SCSI on a standard AT board in as small a size as possible
>while enabling use of as many slots in the back of an AT case for the
>AGPx, PCI and ISA. I was thinking of using something like an AMD-based
>Ethernet chip with the prototype board's VIA motherboard chipset. Anyone
>have comments?

Why? Just to have a very small computer? If so, there's a new "standard"
out that about 1/2 the size of a Micro-ATX board... the whole computer's
about 9-10" high... Available in Athlon & Pentium4 flavors...

... If you were looking at the slower machines to save money, the custom
mobo's will cure that...

Just more assorted ramblings... ;-)

Roger "Merch" Merchberger
Received on Fri Feb 07 2003 - 00:31:00 GMT