[HN Gopher] MouSTer Brings USB to Retro Computers
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MouSTer Brings USB to Retro Computers
Author : rcarmo
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-01-24 12:31 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hackaday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hackaday.com)
| amelius wrote:
| I envisioned a floppy-shaped USB drive that can be inserted into
| a 3.5" drive.
| rocky1138 wrote:
| I have a home-made, bespoke version of one of these for my ST.
| Bought it a few years ago off eBay, I think. It works great. It's
| nice to have an optical mouse.
| unicornporn wrote:
| Oh, headline kind of triggered me. Gave me hope for USB storage
| on Amiga 500. That was an unreasonable thought.
| Lio wrote:
| If this can be programmed to work as an MSX mouse I could finally
| attach a mouse to the Roland S-330 sampler I bought used 25 years
| ago.
|
| I really, really wanted one back in the day but could never find
| one for a sensible price. At the time they were like rocking
| horse crap.
|
| EDIT: Doh! Just looked on ebay for the price of a real MSX mouse
| and the first result is a USB-to-MSX converter specifically
| mentioning Roland samplers.
|
| I guess I can't have been that desperate for one.
|
| The company making these also has Amiga/ST versions too.
| http://www.kmtech.co.uk/
|
| Might be a cheaper option than MouSTer but not as neat and
| pretty.
| kstrauser wrote:
| This reminds me of my periodic wish to have a USB device that
| presents itself to the host OS as a hard drive, but is really an
| iSCSI initiator. Voila: now you can give your Playstation or Xbox
| arbitrary amounts of fast network storage on the home NAS.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I wish we also had SD card readers we could attach to old IDE or
| SCSI controllers instead of old hard drives. Given the low speed
| ancient controllers and CPUs can do IO at a modern
| microcontroller could probably do any complex mapping without
| problems.
| walrus01 wrote:
| such things do exist: https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-SDHC-
| Adapter-40Pin-Driver/dp/...
|
| https://brainbaking.com/post/2020/09/486-upgrade-sd-hdd/
|
| https://www.drem.info/
|
| http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Cool. Thank you.
| pan69 wrote:
| These are indeed very common as walrus01 points out. I use the
| CompactFlash versions in my 286, 386 and 486 set ups.
| mech422 wrote:
| Along these lines - I've always wanted a cheap, universal usb
| wireless adapter. Something dumb, that just reads the signals off
| the usb device, transmits them wirelessly to a dumb reciever that
| uses the info. to reconstruct the data stream on a usb cable.
|
| By 'dumb' I mean it shouldn't care at all about the usb
| data/protocol. It should just bang 0/1s across the wireless
| connection.
| stevekemp wrote:
| That reminds me of the old USB/IP project - something I have
| never used, but which always seemed interesting:
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB/IP
| [deleted]
| yincrash wrote:
| I was very confused on how power was being supplied over RS-232
| (DE-9). Apparently this is for Amiga's 9 pin connector which does
| have a +5V pin.
| osamagirl69 wrote:
| I am not sure how it works on the amiga, but it was a common
| trick in the PC world to leach power off the DTR and RTS lines
| which idle at +12v and can provide a few ma of current per the
| RS-232 specs.
|
| This is also why a lot of peripherals will fail when you use a
| knockoff 'rs-232' adapter that only outputs +-5v instead of
| +-12v
| userbinator wrote:
| ...and likely contains more computing power than the computer
| it's connected to. A USB host controller is not exactly a simple
| device.
| terlisimo wrote:
| similar project https://github.com/EmberHeavyIndustries/HID2AMI
|
| Supports mice and gamepads. You can build one yourself or buy a
| finished product.
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(page generated 2021-01-24 23:01 UTC)