That is exactly what I did (original poster here).Peter wrote: If you don't want to use QL-SD, an emulator, or wait for QLNET support on the Q68, the fastest way is probably to ZIP flopppy contents to ramdisk and then simply COPY it to SER1, even without XON/XOFF.
If the QL is the sender, the lack of Q68 hardware handshake does not matter. The Q68 is fast enough to receive at whatever speed the QL can reliably send.
I used QPTI on both the C68 and SGC+Hermes QL. Communication speed was 19200 Bauds. I used the ZMODEM protocol. Overall it went very well. But with the zmodem protocol, the receiver (Q68) needs to send feedback to the sender (QL) after every block acknowledging that it was received correctly. Theses feedback, however short they are, eventually were not received correctly by the QL because of lack of handshaking. On average the problem occurred every 18 blocks or so. So for 1 block out of 18 the QL did not received the confirmation the Q68 had received the block correctly (even though the Q68 did in fact received it correctly) so the QL was re-sending that block again. That slowed the speed a bit to 1.3 kbytes per second instead of about 1.5 kbytes per second, but it was still faster than trying at 9600 bauds.
I guess I should have tried direct communication like:
On the QL:
copy ram1_stuff_zip to ser1ir
On the Q68
copy ser1 to ram1_stuff_zip
This should work at full speed. I will try it tonight. But I like the fact that zmodem check the integrity of the communication.
I was not able the send anything from the Q68 to the QL with QPTI + zmodem, even at very slow speed. For some reason, even though the baud speed was set to 1200 bauds on the Q68, 16k of data was send instantly by the zmodem program to some buffer, inside QPTI or SMSQ\E or the Q68 hardware I don't know. The QL at the other end was receiving the data without problem. But the zmodem program on the Q68 would eventually timed out and exit. Again I will try without QTPI.
I answer to everyone that gave solution to transfer my data from my Mac to the C68, I thank every one of you. But the problem was not really to transfer between Mac and Q68, but from the QL to the Mac. I don't have floppy drive on my Mac and I don't want to buy a USB floppy just to transfer data from the QL. Serial transfer is more adequate in my case.
I can indeed built that no problem. In fact, I received a brand new soldering station at Xmas! Let me know when software support is ready. QLnet would indeed be the best solution.Peter wrote: This looks like a typical application for QLNET, for which I hope we will get software support this year.
Could you solder the jack socket and the few external components for that purpose (described elsewhere in this forum)?
All the best
Peter
François