SmartPort Protocol Convertor or SmartPort Bus?

[ymo]

I have written a number of SmartPort Protocol Convertor implementations and have been thinking about programming a Microchip PIC to act as a SmartPort bus target [but as of yet have made no progress]. As far as I know, the only documentation on the bus is found in the IIgs Technical Reference manuals - has anyone seen any further documentation?

[support]

I have a chinook IIc hard drive which I had started to rev eng. This is the Smartport to SCSI converter. I had some info posted on the web but my personal ISP got out of the web hosting business and I havn't gotten back to re posting any of it yet.

There was a fellow who started up a web forum to discuss a project related to recreating a early Mac. He posted some info on his LA captures of the IWM in action. http://www.stockly.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9 - I have not been successful in contacting him though.

My approach was to tackle things from two ends ... start at the begining with the original disk II controller - Understand how that works and then try to understand the smartport packet protocol layered over that. Second start witha working protocol converter and break it down into it's component parts and understand how that works.

Would you be willing to share what you have come up with so far?

Glenn

[mac512]

Hi there!

I've just found this forum and i had to register to tell you that i've been looking for years for a way to connect my IIc to a hard disk through the disk port (no way to think about getting anything for Apple II computers here in Chile).
At some point, i got inspired by the MacBottom hard drive for the Macintosh so i wrote a small driver for PRODOS so my IIc can connect to a virtual hard drive in my PC (with a small program written in PASCAL) over the serial port, but it was really slow (yes, only 9600 bps). It included a clock driver too (inspired in the AE IIc clock). But that was years ago, the disk is wasted and i barely remember how to program in assembler.
As for documentation on the SmartPort bus, according to Unidisk 3.5 Technical Note #1, "The internals of the UniDisk 3.5 are now documented in the Apple IIGS Firmware Reference". I've just purchased this book so if this information is accurate, i may be able to share it with you.

Jose

[support]

Hi Jose, thanks for joining ... I was able to get in contact with Grant Stockly and I think he has posted some new stuff in his forums recently.

I have the IIgs Firmware reference as well.

Michael Mahon posted recently that the SSC cards be bumped to 115,000bps via a software command ... I have been meaning to try a similar test on my IIc+.

Glenn