Quote:
Originally Posted by thec
Floppy port.. interesting...
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Floppy is more interesting as HW provide data transfer (critical from Amiga perspective) - CIA GPIO can be used to perform handshake and with block transfer relatively fast bitrate achieved all this with relatively low CPU usage - crucial from plain 68000&7MHz.
In case of Amiga UART, Copper can be used to output data (as such fast Tx rate) but problem is R(x)eception - UART in Paula is not buffered like 16550 on PC (16 byte FIFO) and every byte will create interrupt - this can kill multitasking efficiently - perhaps block oriented transfer may help a bit but still - this is serious limitation for vanilla Amiga.
Btw - level (voltage) translator used in Amiga (old 1488/1489) can be serious limitation - it can be desired to replace them with something more modern (faster) for example MAX232 like IC's- when FDD serial is used this not a limitation - just use FTDI232 with TTL level translator.