communications through the printer port

[wgoodf]

i have a printer cable and i would like to connect to another computer with it. in essence using the dragon as a terminal.

i found this in issue three of dragon world.

10 'to download a program from another computer select serial output on the master computer ad list program to serial printer then:-
20 poke &HF4BF, &H2A: POKE &HF4CO, &H12
25 poke HF4C1, &12: rem onto dragon 64
30 'the program will appear on the dragon screen and will be crunched
40 'once loaded press reset and list program

now the guy wanted to transfer a program from a minicomputer or similar over rs232 to his dragon 64 - is any of this usable you think. obviously the above is a one way thing. i would need a two way.
any simple way to open the dragon up to do this?

[Gestel]

What I remember is that the dragon 32 Parallel printer port is a 1 way system. Only the handshake is returned. This had to do something with the PIA.
Because the dragon 64 has an RS232 port it has the possibilty to transfer data to another system. So it can be a two way system

Furthermore I once bought a RS232 Cartridge for my Dragon 32 and it had its own TERM program

[prime]

Welll...looking at the circuit diagram the Dragon paralell port has available the PIA lines that the CoCo uses for it's serial bit-banger, so you could in theory use this (with apropreate software) use the lines as a CoCo bit-banger port.

You would of course also need a level shifter between the 5v/GND on the paralell port and the +/-12V of RS232, but something like a Max232+4x10uf caps would do this, cirtainly all the parts needed are available from somewhere like Maplins.

I still mean to try this sometime, and maybe port DriveWire to the Dragon 32/64.

Cheers.

Phill.