Why TIPI

Welcome to the TIPI wiki!

Sideport TIPI Rev2 PCBoard design is complete.

Work is in progress on a PEB design.

Why TIPI?

I wanted a FIAD based storage system for my TI that didn't require my PC to be on. I love HDX, but it requires an RS232 card. I could have just built a compatible RS232 card, but the NanoPeb's are back in production, so no need.

I also wanted to prototype it against my 32k sideport expansion card, because smaller is cheaper, and easier.

My friend ElectricLab, wanted a network interface for his TI. He showed me some basics electronics techniques that are at the core of TIPI, and then I ran with it and developed an abstraction that allows us to provide highly extensible Level 3 IO services via special files, and highly extensible low level messaging services special to TIPI for things like TCP socket support on the 4A!

Bringing up some history: Why 32k sideport? Cheap and sufficient. Plain and simple. A base for all the users trapped between choosing an NanoPeb ( which wasn't in production at the time ), a full peb, or shipping their 4A off to have 32k internal mods performed. And I was learning. That was my first electronics project that interacted with a digital data and address bus.

My goal with TIPI is PEB card form factor. The firmware is all designed to work along side traditional 4A expansion cards. I built the sideport TIPI as a stepping stone to learn how to build the PEB card TIPI.

And, I wanted an open-source platform for people to build upon.

TIPI is not a Floppy disk drive emulator

I didn't build TIPI for replication of previous existing hardware. The only reason it even has devices named "DSK1." and others are for legacy software that is too hard to update to use "TIPI."

While TIPI allows compatibility for level 3 and most level 2 IO when a legacy floppy drive device name is mapped to a directory, it does not emulate the floppy controller. There may always be incompatible software. Emulating the floppy controller has never been the goal. There is no disk image. There is no volume size restriction.

As people experiment with writing directly to the TIFDC controller chip, bipassing DSR interfaces, even more incompatible software is being created. I don't care. TIPI isn't for them.

TIPI does not have the space limitation of a 90k floppy disk where sector level IO buys you a few extra sectors to store data in. Other than that, there is no advantage known today to emulation of the TIFDC. TIPI implements all the features necessary to have fun implementing new software without worrying about saving a few sectors.

TIPI is more than a storage device

TIPI allows creation of file-system facades for Raspberry PI services, as well as low level messaging interfaces to them. We have used this to allow loading basic programs directly from a URL, implementing a TELNET client, a framework for network games service, access to mice, native os file access, and the future will hold more.

Extension requires no changes to the DSR ROM, no changes to the TIPI hardware. You have a playground on the Raspberry PI for adding services the 4A can access! Your imagination is the limit, along with your software engineering skills.

Jedimatt42 of atariage.com -M@