One thing that we had been discussing earlier in the week was how to interface with peripherals. I was in a search for serial devices that could hook up directly to Chimera. So that meant things like old serial mice or the Stowaway keyboard for palm devices. But Delicon tells me he can create a PS2 to RS232 adapter that will work for us. This adapter makes sense. Even though it's an added expense, it beats having to pick up legacy or specialized serial devices. I would think people are likely to have extra PS2 devices kicking around. I still think it makes sense to try out serial mice directly, however. I think they will work. They only talk at 1200 baud and most of them only send out 3 bytes per packet. The 2600 should be able to keep up with two serial trackballs at once. It would be nice to play Centipede and Millipede with proportional trackballs, wouldn't it??

Another thing is the AtariVox. I think it will be possible to hang AtariVox off the Chimera port. It may even be possible to hang an AtariVox and a mouse off the same serial port since the Atari sends data to AtariVox (and monitors the hardware flow control line) and the serial could just hook up to serial receive and DTR.

The only thing we really have to worry about is power consumption. We are taking no chances with the next revision board. It will be able to take in power. However, we'd like to be able to certify safe hardware configurations for Chimera that are not likely to require more than stock power. The base configuration of the cart should not require any additional power. I think it's likely that two of the right kind of trackballs should work safely without any extra power. But in theory, there are enough expansions options available to potentially require added power. So we may end up shipping the cart with a power jack just in case.