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SubjectRe: Parallel, IEEE 1284, Zip drive
On  9 Apr 96 at 22:07, Grant R. Guenther wrote:

> Albert Cahalan wrote:
> >
> > > is there already anybody working on a Kernel driver for the new
> > > parallel port modes? I'm going to use the EPP mode with a
> > > Hardware Project and it would be nice if a device driver
> > > were already available!
> >
> > We have a problem.
> >
> > PLIP, Zip drives, printers, status bars, ...
> > 8/4 bit, 8/8 bit, sometimes 8/8 bit, IEEE this and that...
> >
> > It seems that the port driver should be apart from the device.

Good idea! I'm thinking of repeated implementations of EPP modes,
etc.

>
> It is certainly worth thinking about, but I don't know if it will gain us
> very much. If all the devices were 1284 compliant, then it would be
> possible to design a 1284 API and implement drivers for the different
> kinds of physical ports, but PLIP isn't a 1284 device, and from my
> work implementing the driver for the ZIP I don't think it is either.

I think "port driver" was not meant to be "parallel SCSI
interface"...

>
> I tried to compare the ZIP protocol with 1284 - hoping there would
> be a correspondence that would validate my reverse engineering effort.
> 1284 specifies how one strobes the nybbles in 4-bit mode, for example,
> but it doesn't resemble the way the ZIP does it.
>
> I've also been studying the protocol used by the ShuttleTech chips (as
> found in the parallel EZ135, for instance). They use a 16-bit protocol
> (in fact, they seem to be doing ISA bus replication), while the ZIP
> and PLIP are 8-bit, as are printers.
>
> There is, however, one thing that *is* desperately needed, and that is
> a sharing protocol. The ZIP drive and the EZ135 both support chained
> printers. And, if you want to risk your data, you can actually run both
> the ppa driver and the lp driver on the same port. (Bill Riemers has been
> playing with this and reports that it works - I discourage it because
> of the danger that unexpected printing activity would corrupt a disk
> data transfer.)
>
> I recall that someone raised this question a few months ago - Ulrich
> Windl, perhaps - but the thread died without any interesting discussion.
> (And I was too busy to push it.)
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


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