[Coco] ESP8266 BBS setup

[Bill Nobel]

I was the one who did some investigation of the stock AT code that comes with the esp8266.  I found that the stock code is not usable for using with DriveWire at all.  I have my own custom esp8266 firmware that I have been working on that is a complete transparent bridge: you telnet to it and the bytes sent over wifi go to the coco, and whatever the coco sends goes back out the other direction. The stock firmware does not work this way, and in fact is really broken if you are expecting a transparent communication channel like this or any other modem would provide while it is connected.


I’m aware of that now playing around a bit with it.  I’ve gotten a hold of a firmware from Jul 2016 from Esspresif that I’m trying to get uploaded, but so far no success.



IIRC RiBBS is a os-9 bbs system right? If that is the case it would be possible to write a custom esp8266 firmware that runs a mini DriveWire server on it that accepts incoming telnet connections and can open a /N virtual serial channel on the nitros9 side, or I guess a bbs would want to open multiple /N  ports and sit on them until someone connects, could be a solution there too.


You are correct.  RiBBS is a OS-9 based system.  Charles West was the original author of RiBBS and later on Wes Gale got involved.  At the time that’s when Wes got a hold of me at the time to help clean up some of the FidoNet stuff as we were the only people in Canada that had a system running at the time.  We ended up having some of the source but not all.  There is a video Boisy Pitre posted a while ago from the PNW_1992 fest that Wes and myself did a presentation about FidoNet & Echomail.  It’s up in the youtube realm somewhere


Bill Nobel
b_nobel at hotmail.com<mailto:b_nobel at hotmail.com>