Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!lion!ccplumb
From: ccplumb@lion.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Re: Mouse to Transputer
Message-ID: <20540@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 5 Feb 90 04:19:58 GMT
References: <900202114455.000014B40C1@prlvax1.prl.philips.co.uk>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: ccplumb@lion.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 23

In article <900202114455.000014B40C1@prlvax1.prl.philips.co.uk> EDMONDS@prlvax1.prl.philips.co.uk (Mark from Philips) writes:
> Does anyone know of a mouse/transputer board out there?

> Or is it a simple case of buying an RS232 to transputer interface and plugging
> a mouse in?  Has anyone done this? 

Assuming the mouse you want to use sends RS232 signals (like many IBM PC
mice), then that's all there is... except for writing a device driver, of
course.

At Cogent, it was just a Z8530 serial chip (and that %^&%^ 2.2 us delay
between accesses; almost worth a context switch, but not quite) hung
off the bus with some apropriate chip select decoding circuitry.

This is where I learned that transputers are really great I/O processors.
Interrupt dispatching is a bit of a pain, but the on-chip timer makes
real-time constraints easy to satisfy, and the unaligned block move is
useful for buffer-bashing.  I just wish there was an instruction to copy
from a 1-byte-wide port to a 4-byte-wide one.  The 2-D move could do the
job, but the penalty per line is absolutely disgusting; it was faster to
write our own.
-- 
	-Colin