sburrow wrote:
Hello everyone!
Most if not all of the 6502 computers from the 80's had tape, floppy, and/or carts. What are today's replacements for those?
I've been researching a little bit, and searching the forum, and I'm going to make a small list of possible ways to store data externally. This would be for things like BASIC programs the user types up, games, and other things that need to be used at a later date. Some of these ideas are better than others:
1) Old school tape or floppy drives.
Pros: It's retro!
Cons: Because most computers today do not use those, you are kind of creating a bubble environment.
There is the issue of the actual hardware - both on the CPU side and the actual physical floppy drive (and media). The latter - drive + media can be solved by a "GoTek" or similar unit though...
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2) Serial port through UART. This could be RS-232 or variants using USB.
Pros: All computers have USB, and some have an actual serial port.
Cons: There is overhead with required chips, either being MAX232's, 6551's, or daughter/breakout boards.
Easier to get hold of and program than the old FDC controller ICs though - the flip side is writing a filing system that uses a serial protocol - actually not that hard but still needs to be done.
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3) Writing to an EEPROM.
Pros: Since EEPROM's like the 28C256 can just be written to, very little modification is need to store data.
Cons: It's not designed for that, it won't last forever, and it's not really 'external'.
Floppys weren't designed to last forever either - however, SPI EEPROM (and lets face it, an SD card is just a fancy SPI eeprom!) are not hard to setup and use - but - see above - you still need to serialise access to it to create a filing system - and arguably if you can use a serial port then you can apply the same style of interface to an SPI interface.
(And yes, there are some parallel flash devices - some even look like a classic IDE drive...)
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4) Cartridges. This is basically like the EEPROM but with the idea that you can plug/unplug it.
Pros: Same as the EEPROM, you can just write to it as if it were RAM or something, simple to do.
Cons: Again same cons as EEPROM, and you won't be reading data off of that cart to another computer. One way street.
Not a lot I can add here...
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5) SD cards. Typically using SPI interface (as far as I've seen).
Pros: All computers can read/write to SD cards somehow, sometimes through USB adapters.
Cons: Similar to serial port, and file type overhead is something to look out for.
See above - although now I re-read this, I suspect you meant parallel EEPROM devices above. Realistically it'll never wear out in the lifetime of your retro computer.
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Honestly, that's all I could come up with right now. I'm thinking here about generally available ways to doing this today. And I'm sure there's a way to send/grab data from a USB thumbdrive, but I wouldn't know where to start.
Personally, I think that writing a USB driver, then USB Mass-Storage module on-top of that and interfacing it to a retro PC is just too much.
However there are some devices like this:
https://www.hobbytronics.co.uk/usb-host-board-v24 that may help...
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Thoughts? Additions? Corrections?
I don't know what the "holy grail" might be although one thing I might suggest if using some sort of removable media (like SD card) might be to use a simple FAT filing system - much as it hates me to say it. At least that way you get the ability to easily remove it, plug it into a "PC" for easy file transfer... I sort of regret designing my own filing system for my Ruby project, but at the same time it gave me more flexibility. I'm looking at the Minix filing system for my next project as that can still be read under Linux... (and will retro-port it to Ruby in time)
Hope you find something that works for you.
-Gordon
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