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Comms link question...
Captian Crazy - Mar 6, 2002
  Captian Crazy Mar 6, 2002
I might be able to get a Comms link card cheep; i'll I ask my dad to see if he can specal order one. Now can you use a _regular_ DB25 cable from the par to the Comms link card ?

 ExCyber Mar 6, 2002

  
	
	

		
		

			Now can you use a _regular_ DB25 cable from the par to the Comms link card?


Depends on what you mean by "regular"... several things use DB25. What you want for commslink is a straight-wired (i.e. not laplink, null-modem, or anything else netwoking-related) male-female parallel cable. These are commonly sold as extension cables for parallel port equipment such as printers. If the package says something like "IEEE 1284 extension cable", that should do the trick. I recommend getting a cable ~2 meters (6 feet) or less in length - I've mostly done okay with a 10-foot cable, but it can cause problems from time to time.

 Captian Crazy Mar 7, 2002
I mean like a extension cable you would use for a printer or a external CD rom.

 ExCyber Mar 7, 2002
Yes, those should work fine.

 Captian Crazy Mar 8, 2002
Thank you ! I wouldnt need a long cable as mu saturn is literualy next to my PC... Now one of my last questions. Would a P166 be a good place to start for a system to program for saturn ?

 ExCyber Mar 8, 2002
A P166 would be fine. A high-end 486 (100-133MHz or so) would probably do okay too. Just make sure you have enough HD space for the dev tools you want (might want to be careful to get a system than can handle drives > 528MB, as this was a common BIOS limitation in older systems). Topping it off with RAM might not be a bad idea either (particularly if you're going to be compiling stuff), but it depends on the chipset... I'm told that some just turn off the cache once you pass a certain amount...

 Captian Crazy Mar 8, 2002
It has a 4.3 gig hdd I could clear of all my dos games and reformat... No problem there.

 ExCyber Mar 8, 2002

  
	
	

		
		

			I could clear of all my dos games


No need to do that unless it becomes necessary... DOS games are nice (well, the post-CGA ones anyway ).

It really depends on what kind of OS and dev environment you want to set up. The compiler and SGL aren't really that big.

 antime Mar 9, 2002
One thing though: if you want to run Windows NT (or 2K or XP) you'll have to fiddle around with port-access drivers when using the comms-card programs. For PSX developing there's the excellent CatFlap replacement for the regular Caetla tools that work under NT, but AFAIK no such tool exist for the Saturn.