[Coco] Run a CoCo while sitting on the toilet! :)

[Roger Taylor]

I hope the title says it.  For those who can only get dial-up where 
they live but like to roam about the place with a wireless laptop 
doing their work and CoCo ventures, I found an answer, but not 
without weeks of research and trial and error.  For some it probably 
falls right into place (no pun intended), but for me I was having 
trouble with this kind of networking for years using Windows 98 and XP.

Basically, I'm using two Vista PC's (a wireless equipped laptop, and 
a PC using a simple Belkin Wireless G USB adaptor), no access points, 
routers, or high-speed modems, and am surfing the web and doing 
e-mail, etc. by way of the FreeProxy server software running on the 
main PC that's connected via dial-up.  The result is that you can do 
neat things like visiting the Mocha CoCo emulator site (emulator in 
your JAVA-based web browser) and have a portable "CoCo" without 
requiring any downloadable emulators, ROMs or CoCo 
software.  Ofcourse, you can probably mount local DSK images in the 
emulator, making it even more Cool.

So I'm sitting on my sofa right now with Mocha, a fairly accurate 
CoCo for all practical purposes, beamed to me from the main PC using 
802.11g, ofcourse with no wires or dongles coming out of the 
laptop.  This was a not-so-instant portable CoCo experiment, but it 
works.  Can we say headaches?

The trick is the 'adhoc' networking technique that's already in Vista 
and all you need is a few wireless USB adaptors or cards if your 
computers aren't already equipped.  So I just had to buy one 
adaptor.  All salespeople will tell you that you'll need a router and 
also that you can't share dial-up, but we know that's not true; we 
just had to put our minds to getting it to work.

-- 
Roger Taylor