Question about USB on the minimig

[Hattig]

If you eventual point in all this is that you want to use a USB gamepad to play Speedball 2, then this is nigh-on impossible.

Yes, you can attach a USB port to a 68000, the rest of the system is just code. However due to the nature of the software part of USB, you would need to run what is probably quite a heavy duty bit of software alongside the game that already probably uses >90% of the 68000's available power. Alongside that you would need to map the USB gamepad input into standard Amiga joystick inputs. And then you'd realise that Amiga games boot from ADFs on the MiniMig, and that there's no way to stick the USB stuff into that.

The only way it could be done would be to have a second CPU that runs the USB stack transparently, and also does the mappings to classic Amiga hardware transparently. Here, of course, you start seeing the level of work that would be required.

[Hattig]

More and more it sounds to me like there are really two groups of people who are asking for USB 1) You have people who want access to USB Mass Storage devices and other high tech gadgetry and 2)You have people who just want access to USB joysticks, mice, keyboards. Now I think it's safe to say that it is looking more and more unlikely that the first group will ever see this functionality without redesigning the MiniMig completely but what about the second group?

The whole point is that (2) is really difficult, requires a lot of extra hardware and why not just use PS2 keyboards, mice and 9-pin joysticks?

(1) is a lot more possible, if you just want to run USB within Workbench. It might be slow given the 68k, but once you have the software stack, you can attach whatever USB devices you want - including keyboards, mice, gamepads (they just won't work in a non-AmigaOS environment).