4 ms·

If you read the manual at the link, you’ll see you can still do that via the serial port.

krallja 4y ago
The site appears to be down, and I only have the manual that came with my revision :/ How does it work? Do you have to toggle in a serial boot loader first? I can’t imagine Lee adding all the hardware necessary to implement serial DMA…
- krallja 4y ago
  Ok, the manual loaded. Yes, you do have to provide a boot loader for serial: > Serial I/O needs a program. You can "toggle in" a simple serial loader, or, add an EPROM at U2 with a serial monitor to communicate with a Terminal program… The parallel port version allowed you to control every switch and read every LED via your host computer, which means you don’t need to toggle anything into RAM manually. And of course a serial port doesn’t provide any GPIO, so you can only beep a speaker with Q.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    All the signals are brought out to J1 at the bottom edge of the front panel card. It appears that you could populate that with a header (since you have the soldering skills to build the kit in the first place), but I'm not sure how easy that would be if the header on the backside (which connects to the CPU board) interferes with soldering. You could at least connect wires. I would not be surprised if Lee Hart continued to sell the DB25 version. It would depend on demand. I'd ask, he seems very flexible. Maybe he'll continue the development and introduce an FP that had both address and data bus 7-seg LEDs and eliminated the individual LEDs. Apparently PCs running DOS could control the Membercard via the parallel port, but Windows cannot. I suppose there was a lot of discussion leading up to the change after twelve years, but I'm not yet up to speed on that. Edit: I forgot to note that you only have to buy a $5 EPROM with the kit. That will include the bootloader, and much more. With that, the card will boot into a monitor.

The site appears to be down, and I only have the manual that came with my revision :/ How does it work? Do you have to toggle in a serial boot loader first? I can’t imagine Lee adding all the hardware necessary to implement serial DMA…

krallja 4y ago
Ok, the manual loaded. Yes, you do have to provide a boot loader for serial: > Serial I/O needs a program. You can "toggle in" a simple serial loader, or, add an EPROM at U2 with a serial monitor to communicate with a Terminal program… The parallel port version allowed you to control every switch and read every LED via your host computer, which means you don’t need to toggle anything into RAM manually. And of course a serial port doesn’t provide any GPIO, so you can only beep a speaker with Q.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  All the signals are brought out to J1 at the bottom edge of the front panel card. It appears that you could populate that with a header (since you have the soldering skills to build the kit in the first place), but I'm not sure how easy that would be if the header on the backside (which connects to the CPU board) interferes with soldering. You could at least connect wires. I would not be surprised if Lee Hart continued to sell the DB25 version. It would depend on demand. I'd ask, he seems very flexible. Maybe he'll continue the development and introduce an FP that had both address and data bus 7-seg LEDs and eliminated the individual LEDs. Apparently PCs running DOS could control the Membercard via the parallel port, but Windows cannot. I suppose there was a lot of discussion leading up to the change after twelve years, but I'm not yet up to speed on that. Edit: I forgot to note that you only have to buy a $5 EPROM with the kit. That will include the bootloader, and much more. With that, the card will boot into a monitor.