[Coco] CoCoNet wireless milestone

[Allen Huffman]

On Mar 30, 2009, at 10:54 AM, Roger Taylor wrote:
> SAVER stands for Save Remote File (to a virtual disk).  I guess it  
> should be called LOADR for Load Remote File, but there's no actual  
> loading taking place.  The action taking place is a saving action  
> (from a web server, to a CoCo disk) so I enhanced the SAVE command  
> to support it.  If a handful of people can agree on a better way of  
> doing this action then I'll be glad to change the command format for  
> this particular function.

So it's actually a COPY operation? Copy from remote location (as if it  
was a device) to a disk?

> To best describe what SAVER currently does, it grabs a web page or  
> file (binary supported), and quickly saves it to a mounted virtual  
> disk.  Now every DOS command can access the local copy of the web  
> file as usual.

Interesting. I haven't followed this at all so I'm out of the loop. I  
was thinking it was a way to load something from a website -- like  
instead of doing:

RUN"PROGRAM.BAS:2"

To run a program from floppy drive 2, you could run it from a disk  
image on the net.

The syntax just confused me -- unless I am confused, and it isn't  
actually a COPY operation?

> DRIVE #,"pc path" lets you read or write to the remote PC .dsk image  
> as usual.  DRIVE #,"web URL" grabs a temporary copy of the

That makes sense -- map in this virtual (remote) disk image as a drive  
number for the CoCo.

> .dsk image and if you write to it, you're just writing to a temp  
> copy, which lets programs run as usual but if you want to retain the  
> disk you just BACKUP # to some_other_drive (physical or PC virtual  
> disk).

Do if I wanted to clone an image on the web to my local (physical  
drive 0), I would do:

DRIVE 2,"http://cocofiles.com/games.dsk"
BACKUP 2 TO 0

Yes?

I think the "map something virtual -- disk image on PC or disk image  
on internet -- to a drive number" makes perfect sense. I'm just a bit  
confused over the use of SAVE/LOAD.

Why is that needed? Could you just map the drive to a number, then use  
normal LOAD, RUN, SAVE, SAVEM, LOADM, COPY, DEL, etc. to that drive  
after it's mapped in?

> There's still GET and PUT that can be reused as part of a Disk  
> command, such as DRIVE GET, DRIVE PUT, or DRIVE LOAD, DRIVE SAVE,  
> etc.  or even... SAVE DRIVE #   The first command needs to be an  
> existing DOS command I can detour from and any tokens from BASIC,  
> ECB, or DECB can be checked for after that, making it possible to  
> chain commands together.

What will that buy us as users? Is there anything really needed beyond  
virtually inserting a disk (image)? The usage of a drive number --  
whether it be a physical CoCo disk in the floppy drive, or a disk  
image networked on a PC, or a disk image (read only, would give ?WP  
ERROR if you wrote to it) via internet -- seems enough to satisfy all  
needs?

> I think that DRIVE #, ON or DRIVE # ON should switch to a physical  
> drive, but it appears that some other system out there does it the  
> opposite from that.


RGB-DOS, being the 80's kind of DISK BASIC drive extensions -- would  
be the good model to follow. If it drifted from standard specs, it  
would be good to follow the same drive. I seem to recall it only  
allowed turning on/off physical drives, and everything else was just a  
number :0-255 to existing standard commands. So you would simply be  
adding the ability to assign a remote disk image or URL to a drive  
number.
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