[Coco] atari USB device

[James Dessart]

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Mark McDougall wrote:

> Of course, USB ethernet is also a pretty interesting option. Anyone feel 
> like porting Samba to the CoCo? ;) Or bluetooth? ;)

USB ethernet adds a layer of complexity, when you can get suitable
ethernet chips for pretty cheap. In both cases, you have to write drivers.
Drivers for a simple ethernet controller chip are easy to find for 8-bit
microcontrollers, but drivers for USB ethernet devices would likely rely
on APIs that would only be available on 32-bit, modern systems.

If we're going to be porting a file-sharing protocol over ethernet, we'd
also need a TCP/IP stack. But given the state of Samba, I think it'd be
much more sensible to write an NFS client for OS-9, but even then OS-9's
dependence on RBF would need to be broken first. This, of course,
pre-supposes the aforementioned TCP/IP stack.

Which is an entirely different ball of wax. From my own researches for a
CoCo-hosted TCP/IP stack, uIP is the best bet. It's small, easily
portable, and there are ethernet chip drivers that can be easily ported
once the hardware's in place. The API is a bit difficult to grasp, but
then again, where else are you going to find a TCP/IP stack that fits into
6 KB or so of RAM?

I have some ideas on how a TCP/IP stack could be integrated into OS-9, but
not enough knowledge of OS-9 itself to put it in myself. Then there's the
question of making network device drivers for Ethernet and perhaps SLIP.
PPP is pretty much out of the question, if you want to use the computer
for something other than a single, simple, networked application. PPP
takes up a lot of code space, and doesn't give you much in the process.

James