5 ms·
A minimal-part-count way to connect an SD card to a 68K
- ComputerGuru 3y agoAll dmitry.gr posts are worth reading if you enjoyed this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dmitry.gr https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dmitry.gr
- Wiles_7 3y agoRunning Linux on an 8-bit microcontroller is a classic. One of those articles I re-read every few years.
- s800 3y agothat is pretty ingenious
- dmitrygr 3y agoThanks. Currently working on making a similar thing for Sony memory stick. :)
- kragen 3y agough, i have negative associations with sony designs
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoWhy though?
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoThis has got me wondering if almost the exact same thing could be done for the (seldom used) Atari ST cartridge slot: https://allpinouts.org/pinouts/connectors/cartridges_expansions/atari-cartridge-port/ https://allpinouts.org/pinouts/connectors/cartridges_expansi... Has 2 chip select lines. Hm.
- rasz 3y agoI had exact same association when reading about this hack on hackaday :) https://hackaday.com/2024/01/13/wiring-an-sd-card-to-a-handspring-pdas-68k-bus-with-only-three-sot23s/#comment-6718693 https://hackaday.com/2024/01/13/wiring-an-sd-card-to-a-hands... I immediately remembered Atari ST read only cartridge port abused into talking to Realtek ethernet chip https://sites.google.com/site/probehouse/how-to-network-an-atari-st/atari-ethernec-network https://sites.google.com/site/probehouse/how-to-network-an-a...
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoOh yeaaah, I forgot about that.
- dmitrygr 3y agoYes. Easily.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoBiggest problem I think is that I believe the cartridge port connectors are un-obtanium from parts suppliers these days.
- dmitrygr 3y agoHad the same problem here. I suspect the ones I bought may be the last in the world
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoWhen I look at these card edge connectors, they don't seem like there's all that much to them, you'd think somebody would be able to make them to spec :-(
- fragmede 3y agowhat a beautiful bit of computer engineering!
- gorkish 3y agoThe entire Palm ecosystem was/is pretty awesome. I wish very strongly that it would have endured.
- kragen 3y agoyou can probably emulate it on current hardware, though the palmos programming sites are bitrotting i wonder why it didn't endure? multitouch? inadequate 68k performance? malware?
- Firmwarrior 3y agoI'd guess they didn't market it well enough A palm pilot could do most of what people love iPhones for, but the only people who used them were business freaks and super-nerds
- LgWoodenBadger 3y agoMy Palm V was grayscale, did not have any wireless outside of some useless IrDa, no audio (music) or video of any kind, no camera, and no web browser.
- kragen 3y agoyeah but the palm vii came out the same year, in 01999, and did have mobile internet service and a web browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_VII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_VII but cost more it wasn't until the handspring treo 180 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring_Treo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring_Treo (released in 02002) that palmos devices were smartphones. the higher-end models even had color
- Brian_K_White 3y agoMy Samsung SPH-I300 had color and audio and internet and browser and basically an app for anything you could imagine just like android or ios today (better, since there was no Apple or Google preventing anyone from making any app they want, or preventing you from installing it), in 2000 or 2001, 7 years before the iphone or android. Without a keyboard or numpad just a full front face color touch screen, it was a prototype modern style phone. I had email, audible.com app, ebook readers, ssh and irc clients, even a vnc client. Vnc & rdp were ractically useless on 14.4k dialup equivalent and 160x240, but it actually physically worked. I had a couple different contacts db to dialer integration apps. Then just the infinite random apps like a netmask calculator, resistor color code calculator, etc. The contacts db had my works entire customer & vendor dbs on the phone while off line by using a simple csv export and the palm desktop synced it to the phone. Full size sd card slot. It was freaking great. in 2001. iphone and android are 2007
- amatecha 3y agoThat's awesome! I was trying to figure out.. what port/connection would you hook up a similar device to a 68k computer like a Mac or Amiga or such? This would be a pretty awesome super-affordable alternative to a BlueSCSI[0] or the like, maybe? Or is that overly optimistic of me to think? haha [0] https://bluescsi.com/v2 https://bluescsi.com/v2
- snvzz 3y agoSure, but it'd be relatively slow. Sloooow.
- bogantech 3y agoThe hardware's the easy part - then you have to write a device driver for one of these systems
- actionfromafar 3y agoThat's not very hard, they are documented to death and back.
- wrs 3y agoIn 1985 (or so) I got a “WARP 20” internal SCSI hard drive for my original Mac 512k. Of course there are no internal expansion connectors at all on an original Mac. Steve didn’t want the purity of the hermetically sealed machine to be sullied. This thing came with a custom-made tool to get the case open (a long-shafted Torx driver with a flat paddle welded to it to pry the case apart). Once there, you removed the ROM chips, placed them in a little daughterboard, and inserted that into the ROM sockets. That’s how they got access to the CPU bus. There was a SCSI controller and some address decoding on the board that attached to the drive over a ribbon cable. They wrote a custom driver to talk to the controller, and even gave out the source code. Fortunately Apple had just released the first version of HFS for the 800k floppy disks, so to the OS this looked like a giant (20MB) floppy.
- wirecollector48 3y agoNice timing.. I just got MMC support working in my u-boot port for the mc68ez328 to load Linux :D