An IEEE 1394 serial bus (58) is interfaced utilizing a physical layer (54) to extract the data and a link/transaction layer controller (200) to interface the data from the physical layer (54) to a host system. The host system consists of a peripheral device (210) which is interfaced with various host buses (202). The link/transaction layer controller (200) is operable to emulate the microcontroller function such that addresses can be transmitted to the peripheral device (210) along with data, such that a remote node can access the peripheral device (210) by transmitting address and data information thereto. Alternatively, address and data information can be transmitted from the peripheral device (210) to the controller (200) which will process the received address and data and transmit it to a remote node.