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Home Forums 68kMLA Getting an iMac G3! — #10
Post #10 by Mike Richardson
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryNetworking
Post DateTue, 15 Jan 2008 - 15:45
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/getting-an-imac-g3.11438/
Post
I have a question, I want to know if I could go out and buy a USB to serial (With the 9 pin plug) and put my PC to Mac serial cable in there and transfer stuff from my PowerBook 150 to the iMac.
Quite sure that you can't. The Basilisk II (Mac emulator) documentation says, if my memory serves me, that even though it's possibly to use the serial ports from within it (and I've connected to my Newton with it) it is "physically impossible" to connect an emulated Mac to a LocalTalk network. I'm not sure what part of the chain makes it impossible, but I think it's something about the differences between Mac serial ports and PC serial ports. Not sure, though.
LocalTalk uses a hardware chip in the Mac that manages the network connection in LocalTalk.

"The port was driven by the Zilog SCC which could serve as either a standard UART or handle the much more complicated HDLC protocol which was a packet oriented protocol which incorporated addressing, bit-stuffing, and packet checksumming in hardware. Coupled together with the RS422 electrical connections, this provided a reasonably high-speed data connection." - Wikipedia

I think that Basilisk does not really emulate the Zilog SCC and just gets away with a cheap serial port emulation.

mp.ls