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Home▸ Forums▸ 68kMLA▸ Dream peripherals (the return) — #65
Post #65 by mboconnell
Source Forum68kMLA
Category68k
Post DateTue, 29 Apr 2008 - 21:20
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/dream-peripherals-the-return.8591/
Post
There were a bunch of people posting their desire to see a universal NUBUS adapter, one that allowed the connection of many modern peripherals such as usb flash drives, parallel port devices, CF cards, ect. I had a wild idea when I took inventory of all the IC's I have lying around. What if you constructed a card that flowed like this:

LCIII PDS (for example)

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(x2)Ethernet LAN controller (one to an external port)

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DOS-based PC-on-chip/single board PC, this device would be capable of translating attached devices so that they appear to be network-shared devices. The Mac would not need usb mass-storage drivers, as it would see the flash drive as mapped network drive, same with CF cards, cd-roms, and other peripherals

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USB, ATA, Serial (COM), etc controllers. The PC-translator would make these appear as standard device types, a USB scanner would appear to be a SCSI scanner. ie. The mac sends a command to a SCSI scanner, the PC chip translates that command to what a USB scanner would understand, and vice-versa.

I would love to build this thing, but I do not have the EE expertise to pull it off. I can design simple things, but nothing like this.