Date   : Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:28:04 +0100
From   : darren.grant@... (Darren Grant)
Subject: modern BBC remake

Jules, you are still living in the last millennium ;)

PC's don't come with PCI any more and Laptops don't come with CardBus any
more. So building something on a PCI card or cardbus would require you to
use an old PC, built-in obsolescence isn't a good place to start from. Oh
and PC's don't come with Parallel or Serial ports any more before anyone
suggests one of those options. The overall trend with computer hardware is
to do away with expansion slots entirely and get rid of all old interfaces.
Even IrDA is disappearing and being replaced with Bluetooth.

The only interface you can be certain to find on a modern PC or Mac is USB
2.0. The only other interfaces that you have a fair chance of seeing are
Ethernet and IEEE1394 (firewire). So maybe the answer would be to have a box
with an Ethernet connection on it that could be connected to with a VNC type
app for remote control.

That way the control of it would be completely platform independent, the
network bandwidth required for the low res BBC output and the keyboard,
mouse control would be negligible. The interface on the client computer
would then be irrelevant, as long as it had a way to get on a TCP-IP
network. Then we could control it from a Nokia N770 Linux handheld for
example not just a clunky old PC, could even control it over the net.
Shouldn't be to difficult to stick a basic network processor on the front
end of the BBC output.