✧✦Catherine✦✧Jun 2, 2025

i don't personally do retrocomputing but a lot of the design for #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer is made with an explicit purpose of making retrocomputing nicer (for example, the support for true 5 V TTL that we went to great lengths to preserve, vs. only supporting 3.3 V at most)

i'm quite happy to add support for more retro interfaces to it too

Show threadViolaJun 3, 2025

@whitequark I'd love it for retro stuff! On that note, when I think about retro interfaces, a lot of them are parallel busses (think game cartridges, PATA, and so on) that require more than 16 pins to operate, so having a well designed syncronization system to use two(or more?) glasgows in conjunction would be a (literal)game changer :p . I've read that's a supported use case, but I haven't found code/examples on how it works.

For example, would I be able to use sync two glasgows and have them send parralel bus/logical analyzer data over (ofc assuming I have enogh usb2 controllers to support that troughput) ?

Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Jun 3, 2025
@viola in theory there is the sync pin for that, in practice i'm afraid nobody has tested it (and we don't currently have a logic analyzer that works well, unfortunately; that's something i intend to fix soon)
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Jun 3, 2025
@viola
for wide parallel buses i would recommend either making a simple adapter with a discrete latch IC (which many old systems did!) or waiting for the next revision, revD, which will have 32 pins. (32 pins is still not enough for some really wide buses, so you might need the latch trick anyway)
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Jun 3, 2025
@viola re: USB throughput, if you plug two glasgows into two USB 3 ports without a hub, you're guaranteed full bandwidth on both. with many hubs however you'll be sharing that 480 [raw] Mbps
Show threadViola
@whitequark re: USB. I had those issues while connecting more than two fx2lafw directly to my motherboard's usb 3 ports, and I solved them buy buying another usb 3 controller that also caps out at two. Never figured out why tho
Jun 3, 2025 at 1:18amWeb
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Jun 3, 2025
@viola oh that's fascinating, I'd love to see the output of `lsusb -t` for the slow case
Show threadViolaJun 3, 2025
@whitequark I'll retest it tomorrow and send it. But yeah, lsusb -t was showing a usb 2 hub created under the usb 3 one. and all usb 2 devices where under that (even tho they were phyisically connected to two different usb 3 ports, on the same controller)