When reading the latest QL Today I noticed a very brief mention of the USBWiz project, so this seems to be an approporiate time to give a brief update of where things stand.
Firstly, the last six months or so have been hectic and any development has been impossible, not the least of which being because I and my wife have now moved to Cornwall and all of my QL stuff is awaiting unpacking from its storage crates. Anyway, the current position is this: 1) I have built a prototype USBWiz "Black Box" that contains the USBWiz and an RS232/TTL serial level converter. This presents two USB ports and one SD Card slot, several status LEDs and a serial connection to the QL. Power is via a generic Maplin 5V PSU intended originally to charge devices via their USB connection. 2) There is a functioning file manager program, written in TURBO'd SuperBasic that allows access to FAT formatted SD Cards and USB Drives. Files may be transferred to and from the QL, and the extended attributes (i.e. the 64 byte header for executables) is preserved. At the moment the program operates in character mode, but my plan is to migrate this to the Pointer Environment very soon. Using an Aurora and a superHermes I have been able to maintain reliable transfers at 115K. 3) There is a part functioning driver that allows SD Cards and USB Drives formatted as native QL volumes to be mounted, although the formatting has to be done with a standalone program. The driver DIR and STAT to function but is not yet capable of reading/writing complete files much larger than a couple of K . . Here is why: The driver is built upon the shell of the QUBIDE ROM, with its hardware access routines stripped out and replaced with calls to a layer that sits above the serial driver and processes Sector Read/Write commands (actually a very simple ATAPI command emulator). Unfortunately, the serial driver has to operate in Supervisor Mode and so does the USBWiz driver, so the result is a deadlock. I really need to go back to first principles to fix this, but just haven't had the time. One solution is to replace the serial driver with a unified driver that handles normal serial IO as well as the meta commands to get/put sectors via the USBWiz. I can't commit to any timescales, but I hope to restart development next month and had planned an article for submission to QL Today. So, in summary, this "can" be made to work; the question is whether the finished product would be fast enough to bring much benefit. I'm in a frame of mind at the moment that says the best way might be to build a custom board that plugs into the expansion connector . and that's a whole other ball game! Any thoughts or suggestions? Adrian _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
