Adventures in LPT Part II.V

I know, I keep bumping back part III, mainly because of school and other projects.

Basically, here's where I am now: The parallel port sucks in Windows. It's impossible to poll the C64's serial communication fast enough in any multitasking OS, which is a huge setback.

However.

I've been looking into using a microcontroller board so that a MCU can handle the serial communications, and a Windows program will run a 6510 emulator, thus the entire apparatus will emulate a 1541 disk drive. This will still use the parallel port, but everything should work correctly...if not, I still get a microcontroller to play with :) . After I get that working (if it's even possible) the project will move to USB. Basically, it'll be like this guy's project, except backwards and I plan to try to get it working all on one ATMega168 MCU. This should actually be pretty simple, or totally not depending on how fast everything is (as I know the USB interface will run in low-speed mode; which is still pretty fast for what we're doing though).

Hopefully all this will work, and hopefully I'll get some money with which to buy the hardware :) .