[Coco] WiFi modem.

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 20 January 2018 04:12:37 David Ladd wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 20, 2018 at 2:12 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> 
wrote:
> > On Saturday 20 January 2018 01:30:46 RETRO Innovations wrote:
> >
> >
> > ​<cut>
> >
> > So it boils down that I am not in a position to advise, just warn
> > that all facets need to be checked. With the speed limits of the
> > coco in handling an error correction protocol such as rzsz, flow
> > controls are a must when the baud rate goes above 240. Even less if
> > its multitasking heavily.
>
> ​Gene, in this case Jim could more than likely easily make a version
> of his board using two 6551's for compatibility and set one 6551 to
> the standard Deluxe RS232 address space and then set the second 6551
> to the Modem Pak's address space.  I myself would even love one of
> these. :D (wink wink)


This isn't intended to be aimed at you David. But it is aimed for the 
younger minds, more familiar with the layout tools than I ever had 
access to, but this old dog hasn't made a conscious effort to keep 
abreast of. I struggle thru an eagle session occasionally, usually it 
gives me a licking before I get something out of it I can use.

And I'll have to plead that I don't even recall the modem packs original 
address. Yet I've made rs232 packs out of several. I usually put 
something in any blank space 4 bytes wide available.

I have fought with the limited i/o space in the coco's because of tandy's 
decision to use a $20 wide space for a pia that needed 4 bytes, not 
once, but twice! Properly decoded, that wastes 7 usable 4 byte wide i/o 
spaces per each pia.

Thats room for 14 more i/o gismo's without any address clashes with 
existing stuff we all own.

I have even gently begged the layout expert folks like Jim and Ed, even 
Roger, to make us a kit to fix that. But apparently with the number of 
different boards over the years, its not practical, I assume for the 
same reason no one has commercialized "The forgotten chip" in the 
Rainbow, which I have used quite successfully in years past as it was 
far cheaper to make an e-disk out of a coco2, than write a $20,000 check 
to the Grass Valley Group for theirs, which gave us english os9 style 
names instead of 2 digit numbers for the disk files, AND was 4x faster 
than the $20,000 version. All it would take is another 74ls138 to do it 
right, and a comprehensive list of where to cut it into the internal 
address lines for each variation of the motherboards.

I do not know if that was malice aforethought or purely a bean counter 
edict at Tandy, but what it was is the warm, steamy, certainly smelly 
stuff usually found on the ground behind the male of the bovine specie. 

But this list has read this bitch before, many times, so I'll shaddup.  

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>