Why does the Amiga One have legacy ports?

[mikeymike]

Does Amiga One mobo come with all the I/O ports needed for a graphics and animation system?

I don't know... what are all the I/O ports needed for a graphics and animation system?

Note that the A1 SE/XE don't have integrated graphics.

and are there any drawbacks to cordless keyboards or mice ...ie: loss of speed

Security is one problem.  The transmissions can be picked up by even monitoring devices outside the house the cordless keyb/mice are in.  Another is weight of the mouse, and another, I would expect, is that the devices' responsiveness wears down as the battery wears down.  And what about when the battery starts getting old?  We're not talking about the technology of battery you'd find in a mobile phone.

why would anyone want to use USB ports anyway ...?

I used to be anti-USB.  Now I'm only anti- stupid uses of USB, such as ADSL over USB.

ill the Amiga One mobo had a fast scsi port and can you get a mobo with a scsi HD?

No and no.  A SCSI PCI card is necessary.

[platon42]

> Also, AFAIK no proper USB printers have yet been designed, the only ones I've heard of are "software" printers, like "software" modems.

That's wrong. All USB printers I know behave exactly like a parallel port printer -- only that the data, that is formerly sent via the parallel port, is now sent via the USB serial cable. Moreover, USB is a LOT faster that the internal CIA parallel port and even a bit faster than the dedicated parallel port cards. And I would argue that it even takes less CPU power (very certain for the internal parallel port, as it has to handshake every single byte and probably also less than the replacement cards). You see, I formerly connected my old Epson Stylus 850 through a USB to centronics adapter and it just worked all the same as before -- same drivers, just usbparallel.device instead of parallel/hyperPAR.device. But now I've got a very nice Canon i950 without a parallel port and it works perfectly!

[Edit: Ah, and speaking of the PPC boards (to not be completely off topic), USB1.1 is still twice as fast as the fastest parallel port, and uses less CPU power (DMA driven), wherewas I think the legacy ISA parallel port is polled.]

> USB is an evolving standard still, and IIRC not 100% backwards compatible.

The problem are more the vendors of some cheap devices in the mass storage sector, but on printers you're very safe that you won't run into problems. Mice and keyboards should be generally safe aswell.

[ritty]

@ amigaone ...even macs have scsi ports

[whabang]

such as ADSL over USB.

My topcom works like a charm... (of course, it lacks  driver support...)

[mikeymike]

@ platon42

Is it possible that the USB printers I've encountered (3 IIRC) *are* software printers, and the ones you've encountered aren't?

@ whabang

My topcom works like a charm... (of course, it lacks driver support...)

That doesn't prove it's not the spawn of Satan though.  :-)

@ ritty

no idea.  :-)

[amigamad]

and are there any drawbacks to cordless keyboards or mice ...ie: loss of speed ,

Yes the dam batterys go flat when your playing games or doing something important.mouses are ok if you buy one that can be recharged by the reciever cradle. :-)

[Floid]

Blah blah blah.

PS/2 ports because it's more convenient than putting/relying on USB stack code in U-Boot; not sure if there's any in there yet or not.

Parallel and friends because 1. the 686B provides them for 'free,' 2. it's a huge board, connectors are cheap, plenty of hardware still uses the old interfaces, 3. the initial reference design was for a development board (and of course, however modified the A1s are/aren't, they're being used to develop OS4); plain old serial is, as stated, convenient for debugging.  The Pegasos was initially demo'd with MorphOS built for such, too.

Plenty of printers speak Postscript or at least 'reasonable' dialects like Epson ESC/P2 (or whatever it is) over USB.*  Plenty of horrible 'Winprinters' that speak parallel - I've got a Lexmark-Compaq IJ900 in the closet... But again, you need a USB stack running, which does take some negligible CPU.  (Regular parallel can also be poisonous to CPU time, depending how the port is wired up or configured...)

Being able to use ATX backing plates cut for de-facto standards among Wintel boardmakers is, of course, a convenience, though I'm not sure if the A1s can/can't.  (Cases generally ship with one or two for common layouts; as noted, boards are meant to include them as well, since it's a standard-sized hole.)

There's no reason even "ADSL" (probably ATM frames) over USB has to suck, it's just that the current nonstandardized implementations do.

*Epson C80 is one example sitting around here.  Though possibly a bad one, since I gather the ESC/P or ESC/P2 business for it ended up juuust different enough for unrelated reasons that some existing generic drivers for the protocol don't always work.  Dunno myself, as it's plugged onto a Mac with 'official' support.  I'm sure Samsung makes some USB-only Postscript lasers, and Okidata probably has a few USB models that speak a standard dialect of HP PCL.

[platon42]

> Is it possible that the USB printers I've encountered (3 IIRC) *are* software printers, and the ones you've encountered aren't?

Well, these days, new printers stop supporting printing out text. But even no user I'm aware of ever contacted me for supporting a software printer. These three printers, did they cost less than £30?

[Argo]

I'm with Joshua. That's my thinking. It's just much easier and cheaper if you don't have to replace all of your hardware at once. Changing out your olf computer for a new case, motherboard, CPU, Memory, etc. and then getting a new printer, scanner, etc. later; would be much more economiclly palatable to people.

[SyrTran]

@Kronos

The ATX-standard does NOT force any layout tothe port!!!

ATX just defines a rectangular space for IO,and the metal-plate to fit
in is supposed to come with the mobo.

This is absolutely true, and a problem with the A1 (no plate), however -

Yes, I know that realitymay differ a bit, but A1 (all versions) and Peg allready feature non-standard  port-layouts,and atleast the Peg comes with a fitting IO-panel.

I will let you speak for the Peg, as I've only seen it in pictures, but the A1XE sitting right next to me (not being used ATM) has its I/O connector layout matching the layout of the Asus CUSI-FX I'm using right now.  It needed no coercing (or cursing :-) ) to fit it into the bog-standard ATX case I got from Case Depot.  AFAIK, this particular layout was, at one time, the exact same layout Intel used for their mobos.

I do recall that the pictures of the A1SE showed a completely different I/O connector layout.

Note - The CUSI is an all-in-one and has the VGA port where COM1 normally sits.