41: Worth getting a card reader?

[Dave Britten]

(02-20-2021 12:34 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  All you need is the PIL-Box, the PC provides a virtual printer and virtual drives, and with pyILPer, you can also have a virtual monitor and plotter. With a 71B you can also use the PC keyboard and monitor; today that would be sold as 'remote operation'. On the PC, you 'mount' .lif disk images into the virtual drive, equivalent to inserting a floppy or tape into a drive. But you can have multiple virtual drives all for the same price.

I don't recall the price of the PIL-Box, but it is easily worth every cent (what is 1/100 of a Euro called?). Although it is undeniably cool and satisfying to use the Card Reader, save that money and put it towards a PIL-Box.

Also, as time and budgets allow, you can also add physical HP-IL peripherals into your Loop, so you can do the 'opposite' of what one normally imagines, by using a a virtual 41/71 with physical peripherals connected.

Looks like an HP-IL adapter runs about the same price as a rebuilt and tested card reader. What's the going rate for a PIL Box? $100-150 or so? And a Pi Zero is practically free if I want something more portable. But given the 41 has much more memory than a 65 or 97, I wouldn't be transferring data as often as loading cards on those older models, so using my laptop as a storage device wouldn't be any worse than using a Graphlink cable with my TI-86 or something.

I could probably be convinced to buy that much stuff, though it looks like PIL Box sales are temporarily suspended right now.

Are the two IL cables built into the adapter sufficient if you're just connecting a single peripheral?