[Coco] Is there a patch or some other way for either MESS or VCC to use the internet?

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Joe F <joef6809 at gmail.com> wrote:
> If someone does a browser and IP stack I'll emulate the hardware in VCC.
> Its something I'd love.
>

I've thought a lot about doing a CoCo/OS9 native IP stack.  Although
I'm not completely against the idea (and I'd find it quite a fun thing
to do), I've sort of come to the conclusion that a hybrid TCP
implementation such as the one in DriveWire 4 is a more useful way to
"do internet stuff" on the CoCo.

OS9 does an excellent job of providing abstract I/O to programs.  An
application can just open a path and read/write without any concern as
to how the I/O is actually happening.  By implemention TCP connections
as standard I/O paths, DriveWire lets *any* OS9 program use a TCP
connection.  The obvious application is to use a telnet connection in
place of a modem with BBS or terminal software, but this model allows
much more.

The DW inetd program works by listening on any given TCP port and
spawning any command you'd like when a new connection comes in.  inetd
just maps this command/program's standard input and output to the I/O
path which is tied to the incoming client's TCP connection.  This
means every OS9 program that uses standard input/output is able to be
used as an internet server.  You can write a client or server for any
given TCP protocol using any programming language and the same "print"
or read/write calls that you would use in any normal OS9 system.

By comparison, a full native implementation of TCP/IP on the CoCo
would not work nearly so easily with existing software and programming
languages.  Unless I've missed it, there just isn't any standard
mechanism in OS9/6809 that could be used to provide standard sockets..
even if there were, there's no existing software to use it.  You would
have to write an intermediate layer that effectively provides the same
type of path based interface found in DW4 if you wanted to make much
use of it.

Thinking beyond DriveWire, there are some very inexpensive
ethernet/802.11 controllers with "TCP/IP on a chip" available.  An
ethernet or wireless rompak could be made, and an OS9 driver could
manipulate the TCP/IP implementation on the device and bridge the
sockets to standard OS9 devices in a way that would work pretty much
just like DW4 does.   Doing the IP stack in the controller makes a lot
of sense to me after seeing how easy it is to "internet enable"
existing software and languages using such a design.

I'm still open to writing a native IP implementation if someone knows
of a reason it would be a better solution (or I might do it just for
kicks someday).  I'm very interested in any opinions on the subject.
With Gary's FPGA Coco coming together so nicely, it's going to be
affordable to have a very fast CoCo, and networking is an obviously
desirable feature in today's internet focused world.  It would be nice
to have a standard mechanism for doing networking things in OS9 that
was not tied to any product and so could be implemented any number of
ways.

-Aaron




>
>
> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 2:52 PM, RJLCyberPunk <cyberpunk at prtc.net> wrote:
>
>> Are there any patches or something that would allow either MESS or VCC to
>> connect to the internet? So it could then use communications software
>> including CoCo Web browsing and so on.
>>
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>>
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