[Coco] Serial and Ethernet in Coco Emulators

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:20 PM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:
>
> Kip,
> As far as I know, no one has ever done the needed work to make any of the emulators have real "outside" connections, though the David Keil and JV Coco emulators did provide a means to add outside PC code (MS M/L) that could be interfaced with the emulators. BUT.....
> Both the MESS and VCC Coco emulators have had "patches" privately done in which to access Drivewire in NitrOS-9 using the Boisy/Becker version of NitrOS-9.
>  The patch for MESS is available on Aarons Drivewire download page but unfortunately, not only do you have to compile MESS yourself, it's written for the Linux version of SDL Mess 0136 only, which is almost impossible to find now.
>  The DW version of VCC has never been released publicly due to a long wait on the VCC author's promise of releasing the source of VCC as an open source project, which he had promised to do several times but once again disappeared. I feel this patched version of VCC should at least be released "as is" in it's patched Beta form due to the enormous possibilities it gives to the communication between VCC and a real Coco running Drivewire.
>

It would be nice if the VCC version with DW support could be released,
or even nicer if VCC itself could be open source.  I have heard
different things at different times about that situation and I think
it's important to respect the author's wishes whatever they may be
even if I wish they were a little different :)

The boisy/becker interface has become sort of a standard, with support
in CoCo3FPGA, MESS (via the patch which is now difficult to use, but
could be fixed up), VCC (via an unreleased modification) and now in
XRoar (open source and all shiny, but coco 1+2 only).  There are also
some potential hardware projects to use this interface for higher
speed DW in physical CoCos.
It's worth noting that this interface is not at all limited to use
with DriveWire.  It's just a connection of (something) to a memory
address inside the CoCo's address space, where (something) is a TCP
socket in the emulators and an external high speed serial port on the
FPGA board.  It could be used in lots of interesting ways.  I hope
that the current situation is simply that its a new thing and given
time it will become more accessible on a variety of platforms.