USB drive would be the holy grail

Building on the IBM PCjr platform offer your thoughts to expand it capabilities
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toddvernon
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USB drive would be the holy grail

Post by toddvernon »

As primarily a MAC user the entire "getting the JR going" thing has been an experience. Got the jrIDE working, got the zip drive working, all is good. But I can't help but wonder how much better this journey would have been if I could have booted, or at least transferred, using USB sticks. Though about starting a project with a PII or maybe Arduino to interface a USB stick with the Jr. Even with the JrIDE time is slipping away for these machines.
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chuckphd53
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Re: USB drive would be the holy grail

Post by chuckphd53 »

Todd...
GOTEK makes a usb device that acts as a 'drive'
I bought a couple from Kevin (texelec) and while they work great, it is basically the size of a disk drive.
you can have up to 100 disk #0-100 on a stick they are still only 360 / 720 k size ugh....
Look at my system in the Gallery the top drive is the USB GOTEK drive.
You can boot from it, if set up as drive A, and it is nice to have different flavors of DOS .
ie.
#0 = DOS2
#1 = DOS3
etc...

I will post more info here in a bit...
“I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.” (AE)
toddvernon
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Re: USB drive would be the holy grail

Post by toddvernon »

Interested. As a primary Mac user with no other PC devices, this sounds interesting, Zip is great and works but its ultimately a retrograde platform serving a retrograde platform! Thanks for the post, haven't run across this yet!
JrCharles
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Re: USB drive would be the holy grail

Post by JrCharles »

Wouldn't the key to interfacing a USB STICK to IDE be the driver?
toddvernon
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Re: USB drive would be the holy grail

Post by toddvernon »

Maybe, not sure.

The key design feature would be a sidecar with a USB port. That would be THE BOMB.
psergiu
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Re: USB drive would be the holy grail

Post by psergiu »

USB Stick ? That's a lot of work :) Now about directly from the network ?
https://www.retrotronics.org/home-page/netpi-ide/

A USB stick is logically presented to the host as a SCSI device - so with the correct glue and a BIOS extension in place, it's do-able. And it already exists as a 8-Bit ISA Card:
https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_USB_Adapter

If that thing works without needing DMA, a PCjr version can be easily built.
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