Green Genesis

[ob1]

Hi you guys.
OK I'm pretty damn sure this topic is gonna be the craziest one you've ever read. But, I think we got 2 things :
- most of our (well, mine) machine just do email, web, a little bit of word editing and ... that's all. And for that, guess what, I have a ... 1.25GHz !!!! And I'm sure you'd laugh at my machine. But Amiga or Atari ST, running at only 8MHz were just good enough to achieve this kind oj job. Man, my Palm (68k powered) can even make OCR and edit my notes ! For sure, my Palm can't run NFL Street 3, and my miniMac (here it is) can't encode video in MPEG4 very quickly (quite 0,1x !!!). But for my main usage, it is enough !
- it's in the "air du temps". Earth is warming and damn hot. Any Pentium4 dissipate more than 100W !!! For sure, Core processor is less more. But we got here machines that don't heat too much. 68k, even dual SH2 ...

It was my first idea before I found out devster Genesis OS and computer. Anyway, ironing isn't that easy for the average John Doe. And I don't think you'd want to make an industry of out it by yourself. I was thinking about a way of easily plugging some things to the Genesis :
- USB port for keyboard and mouse
- RJ45 for network.
Do you think it would be possible ?
The COM port rate is much too slow as far as I know. Any ideas anyone ?

[oompa loompa]

I think adding on a more hardwarem, like a USB port and ethernet network to the sega genesis is really easy. the problem is making the software to use that hardware

btw, the genesis is veeeery slow compared to todays computers. lets say that if you wanted to word process a text document that's 64kb long on the genesis, it would take 1 second to type in a character at the begining of the file (without using some kind of dma copying)

[ob1]

admin said:

the problem is making the software to use that hardware

No play, no gain I guess

admin said:

it would take 1 second to type in a character at the begining of the file

OMFG !!! But the Amiga or ST weren't that long, they could handle it, didn't they ? Was that thanks to much bigger memory ?

[oompa loompa]

i dunno, maybe i'm exagerating the 1 second, maybe it was half a second

[GiGaBiTe]

The 68000 is way too slow to be controlling data from a USB port, you would have to get some slave processor to do it like the SH2.

[jlf65]

It depends on the device - they make USB carts for the Atari and C64 that work great with things like mice and keyboards and joysticks. It would be trying to do USB2 to a drive that would be a wee-bit pokey. ;D

[GiGaBiTe]

jlf65 said:

It depends on the device - they make USB carts for the Atari and C64 that work great with things like mice and keyboards and joysticks. It would be trying to do USB2 to a drive that would be a wee-bit pokey. ;D

A mouse or keyboard on a USB 1.0 or 1.1 port would probably work with the 68000, but you would need 32 bit data transfers for USB 2.0 which the 68000 might be able to do with its internal registers, but not the external bus without sending it in multiple segments.

I'd aim for using the SH2 for USB 2.0 if you were going to implement it.

[ob1]

USB 1.0 is enough for me. Keyboard + mouse. Great news the 68k would be enough.
I'm also thinking about LAN (10Mbps).
Anyway, I'm also thinking about SH2.
I've just received the Schlibersatz Operating System Concepts ...
I'll keep you informed.