For some machines, e.g. a Tandy 1000 RL, it would just be so great to have more than just the one slot they provide. In my 5150, I wish I had just one or two more slots. While I see industrial gadgets for bus extension in those nice high near $1000 marks, I'm wondering how hard is this to do electrically? This wouldn't be for life and death, just something that is basically stable and provides additional expansion. I have only a tiny bit of EE education, so I'm a bit aware of signal problems over distance but never too good at really pinpointing where they occur.
The immediate thing I think of is just chaining additional connectors in parallel and the magic of decoding will be able to talk to the cards, but I'm assuming there must be at least one more piece to the puzzle (because it sure can't be that easy for the industrial guys to stay in business.) Besides probably needing its own power supply, what kind of troubles might something like this run into? Would it pretty much require some kind of "repeater" to push signals across?
The immediate thing I think of is just chaining additional connectors in parallel and the magic of decoding will be able to talk to the cards, but I'm assuming there must be at least one more piece to the puzzle (because it sure can't be that easy for the industrial guys to stay in business.) Besides probably needing its own power supply, what kind of troubles might something like this run into? Would it pretty much require some kind of "repeater" to push signals across?
