Should there be a CPC 'ISO"?

[rpalmer]

TFM/FS,

I have yet to look at the hardware to make it port selectable, but there is scope for it to be selectable as one of the chips has a spare OR gate where an additional address line may be used with the existing decoding to make it not collide with existing RS-232.

However, it should be noted that the use of various devices may still collide with other hardware as the each device never considered what might be connected to the CPC and this is evident by the fact that the various RS-232 makers did not use the same I/O address as the standard AMSTRAD RS-232.

The TCP/IP software cannot use two different devices together as it is a device-less based protocol standard in the first place. That is to handle a TCP/IP packet, the data in the packet has no way of knowing which device it can from or to send it.

rpalmer

[TFM]

I have yet to look at the hardware to make it port selectable, but there is scope for it to be selectable as one of the chips has a spare OR gate where an additional address line may be used with the existing decoding to make it not collide with existing RS-232.

That's really great. The AMS-SIO isn't using that much ports, so it should (I hope) not be a problem. The advantage of non colliding hardware is that people don't have to unplug and replug their extensions.

However, it should be noted that the use of various devices may still collide with other hardware as the each device never considered what might be connected to the CPC and this is evident by the fact that the various RS-232 makers did not use the same I/O address as the standard AMSTRAD RS-232.

Well, interestingly there is very few collision between CPC expansions at all. Commercial hardware shows nearly no collision (the exception I know is the MF2 and a Video-Digitizer). Non-commercial expansions also do pretty well, except the CPC-ISA which collides with a bunch of other hardware. (Some hard-disc interfaces are colliding though. However, this it not a major point, since people probably haven't much different discs. Even I only work with two hard-disc systems at the same time :-)

So we can be glad that we have very few collisions of CPC extensions. And we should keep it that good way :-D Compare to CPC-Wiki I/O list, link provided before.