Whatever happend to...

[+Larry]

Always on my mind is that USB Cartridge that someone came up with. Won an ABBUC prize? IIRC, it was supposed to allow "slow USB devices" (presumably USB-1?) to connect directly with the A8. One of the things that supposedly worked was USB "thumb drives." But never could find one here in the US that worked though. Work on the drivers was needed? RIP?

 

-Larry

[Rybags]

It's one of those things that seemed to get support for a while then died off.

 

IIRC someone got an analog joystick or steering wheel going with it, but little else was supported.

 

Practically anything USB2/3 will have a fallback mode, so USB1 "only" isn't a problem, especially considering even it's low speed mode is practically at the limit of what a 2 MHz 6502 could digest.

 

Pity about it - the price isn't bad and a USB cart could have evolved into something as useful as SIDE or IDE +2.

[Bunsen]

ABBUC produced two USB devices. The first was the USB cartridge. With this device you could connect usb keyboards, game pads, joysticks and mouses with the atari. The problems were: you have to write a driver and you have to patch the program to work with your usb device. As far as I know only Carsten Strotmann (cas) has written some drivers for it. You can buy this device in the US at atarimax.

 

The second USB device that abbuc produced was SIO2USB. With this device you can connect thumb drives to the Atari. This is a really nice device. The guys who built it are waiting for a amount of preorders to build another batch (IIRC). www.abbuc-raf.de

[Marius]

I think one of the greatest features would be to be able to connect a USB printer to the Atari through this.

 

Today's printer almost never come with parallel port. There are still new printers available with parallel port, but these sources are drying up fast now.

[Mathy]

Hello guys

 

Guus Assmann developed the USB cartridge, after I talked him into it. One of the reasons I told him we needed one, was "USB Printer". Since then, I have learned that there's nothing that even remotely looks like a standard, like we had years ago, when most printers were Epson compatible. Which means you need a new driver for just about every new printer.

 

Mathy

[BillC]

I think one of the greatest features would be to be able to connect a USB printer to the Atari through this.

 

Today's printer almost never come with parallel port. There are still new printers available with parallel port, but these sources are drying up fast now.

OKI does have some laser printers that have a parallel port as well as IBM Proprinter XL and Epson FX emulation, check out the B400 Series.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

Using todays USB printers (*) on A8 is just a no go. With the old Centronix standard, everything that the printer had to "know" was in the electronics. It functioned much like an Atari SIO device. You send commands and get a reply if the action was succesful or not.

 

Modern USB printers are stupid and don't have these electronics anymore. It's all in the driver and these drivers are frequently several MB's.

 

 

(*) Some actually have the required electronics inside but usually it's just a model that's also available with a Centronix interface. They just left out the physical connector or adapter interface.

[+Larry]

Post moved to own thread.

[+Guitarman]

Hello guys

 

Guus Assmann developed the USB cartridge, after I talked him into it. One of the reasons I told him we needed one, was "USB Printer". Since then, I have learned that there's nothing that even remotely looks like a standard, like we had years ago, when most printers were Epson compatible. Which means you need a new driver for just about every new printer.

 

Mathy

 

Most laser printers can use a standard PCL driver. Whenever I have compatibility issues with printers on PCs or I can't find the actual driver for the printer I'm trying to configure, I can install a standard HP Laserjet 4 PCL driver and have it work with 99% of the printers out there. I'm sure if someone wrote a PCL driver for the USB Cart, it would cover a large amount of various printers.