ASIC mining of Alt Coins

[bitsport]

Great board.  Been reading here a while and still learning.  I just joined so it is appropriate I have to post this question here in the Newbies section...

Is it possible to use ASIC mining hardware like the Kncminer Jupiter to mine alternate coins, in addition to BTC?  If so is it limited to alt coins using SHA256 or does it require porting their mining software to support the specific ASIC hardware?

Thank you in advance!

[Iwilechu]

Any ASIC hardware designed to mine Bitcoins can only mine altcoins that use the SHA-256 hashing scheme, since the underlying hardware is only designed to perform SHA-256 hashes.

As a result, it is not possible to use Bitcoin based ASIC hardware to mine scrypt based altcoins, such as Litecoins and Novacoins. (The scrypt hashing scheme has heavy requirements that ASIC hardware designed for Bitcoins probably doesn't meet anyways.)

Edit: You might want to take a look at the SHA-256 altcoins listed at http://altcoins.com/ if you're looking to mine an alternate cryptocurrency.

[bitsport]

I really appreciate the quick and informative reply.  You confirmed what I was expecting.

Thank you!