[Duo2400] Re: ADB to USB?

[Scott Holder]

At 01:56 AM 6/27/2003 -0300, you wrote:
>But...
>
>...for exemple, if I'm running Mac OS 9.1 (OS with USB/Firewire support) on
>a 6100 (PPC, non-PCI), could I use an Serial/USB adapter to use USB-only
>hardware with Mac OS 9 support, like the modern Canon Powershots?

The adapters of that sort plug into a USB port and provide serial ports. 
They do not plug into serial ports and provide USB. You could get them to 
physically attach to the machine with a variety of adapters, however they 
wouldn't work.

In general, you can translate from a smarter interface to a dumber 
interface fairly easily, but not from a dumber to a smarter. This is why 
you can go from USB to Ethernet fairly easily (and most other things, USB 
is fairly smart), as well as SCSI to various things, etc. However, 
converting from Serial (essentially a dumb bit pusher/puller) to USB 
(complex interface with hot-swapping, unique device IDs, etc etc) would 
essentially take building a whole USB controller with a serial interface of 
its own, plus software on the other end to handle decapsulating the device 
ids, data, etc etc. Granted it's certainly possible with the "tossing 
enough money at it" approach, but current devices don't do it.

Would be neat though.

Scott Holder