[Coco] Coco Contiki

Joel Ewy jcewy at swbell.net
Tue Feb 26 10:10:00 EST 2008


Willard Goosey wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 01:54:12PM -0500, John W. Linville wrote:
>
>   
>> I've never understood why ethernet is seen as a barrier to entry for
>> developing a coco tcp/ip stack.  90% of the code can be developed
>> just using serial hardware and SLIP framing.  If/when you get that
>> working, then adding ethernet framing, ARP, and an ethernet driver
>> will seem trivial by comparison.
>>     
>
> True.  I think part of it is that the "ethernet controller" chips
> under discussion have most (all?) of TCP/IP implemented in hardware,
> so our poor little 8-bit doesn't have to actually grind its way
> through the HUGE mass of code that is IP networking by itself.  
>
> In theory, we have SLIP, but I've never been able to get the OS-9 port
> of KA9Q to actually talk to a slip server at the other end of the
> serial line.  AFAIK no one else has, either.  Plus, the d00d never
> released his source. :-(
>
> Another part of it is hardware envy.  If the C64 can do ethernet then
> then CoCo SHOULD, too. ;-)
>
> Willard
>   
I keep thinking that someday I'm going to buy a Siteplayer Telnet, but
then I have to use my money on dumb stuff like food and gasoline...  The
thing that bugs me about the Siteplayer Telnet is that since it hooks up
to the serial port, I won't have gained anything in terms of speed. 
Surely one of these little microcontroller modules has a simple 8-bit
bus interface.  I do have some NE1000 cards lying around...

JCE




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