more hardware

When in doubt, just throw some more money at the problem! 🙂

Actually, I’m kidding. But I do have the Parallax USB2SER on its way — maybe the USB will be much faster, buffered, and more reliable. Those Ramtron chips should be here soon too.

So the idea is to either

1> buffer one full track (I actually have 32k, so maybe two) with the RAM chips, and then improve the protocol between the SX and the PC so its much more reliable

or

2> Send it via USB. The USB is much faster, up to 3mbps, and the nature of how I’m going to access it makes it much more reliable. I’ll be using standard microsoft serial COMM functions, treating the USB as a virtual com port. All the clocking issues will be handled by the USB2SER unit. I still have to generate start/stop bits for feeding into the UART from the SX, but that’s easy enough.

More updates once some of this stuff comes and I have a chance to play with them.