[Coco] CoCoNet

[Roger Taylor]

At 07:15 PM 12/27/2008, you wrote:
>Roger, I have to say that this is awesome! Excellent work _ I have a 
>DISTO MC-1 with a 28-pin socket, so this is great!


Yep, you can pop the CoCoNet ROM in, start the PC server, turn on the 
CoCo, and it's ready.  The CoCo won't know the difference.  None of 
the Disk BASIC commands have been crippled, and only about 10 bytes 
of low system RAM are used by the system, which were previously 
unused by any part of BASIC.

I just burned version .09 and the CoCo 3 starts right up as usual.  I 
typed DRIVE 1,"D01" then DIR and I see the listing of "d01.dsk" which 
is stored in the CoCoNet disk folder at coco3.com.  Any disk pathname 
not including a complete path will assume a coco3.com-stored virtual 
disk from the CoCoNet folder.  Thousands of disks can be at your 
fingertips from the second you power up, using only shortcut names 
like "new", "p3", "jeweled", etc.

Just for an example, you could easily start up every day with 
something like DRIVE 0,"new" and instantly have access to floppy disk 
containing new stuff I've written for the CoCo.  That's just off the 
top of my head.  new.dsk gets downloaded quickly to a local copy on 
the PC, so you can even modify it as usual or back it up to a real disk, etc.

I just made the funamentals work.  The limits are up to the CoCo 
user's imagination.

Issues: some web servers require case-sensitive URLs.  Sometimes the 
root URL will work in all caps, but the files have to be 
case-correct.  So you'll usually have to use a URL like 
"HTTP://WWW.COCO3.COM/coconet/somedisk.dsk", or just type it all in 
lowercase.  If the files are stored on the server in all caps, you'd 
have to use all caps from the CoCo.  Again, some web servers will 
work around this.


-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com