[Coco] RS-232 Pak problems

[Allen Huffman]

> 1. Will your setup be available for both bitbanger and rS232 paks.

I will be trying to find a source for parts in bulk so I can offer things cheaper than Amazon, but everything I have  done can be purchased today from Amazon except for the bitbanger serial cable.

I am not sure I will be making these cables, but I might. Otherwise, Cloud-9 makes such a cable, for Drivewire:

http://cloud9tech.com

RS-232 Pak requires more work, but I think I will be able to do it. The cables for that will be easy to obtain, and I’ll find a low-cost source for them as well for those who don’t have one.

> 2. Will your setup work with a coco1 or just a coco3

It should work on a CoCo 1just fine, just slower than the CoCo 3.

The software we port from Commodore BASIC will be simple enough to run on a CoCo 1, but I hope there is interest to make fancier versions of them for GUIs, and OS-9 and such.

I have ben in touch with Bo Zimmerman, author of ZiModem firmware (for the ESP8266). There are a few more features he is planning to add. One I would like to see is to expand his “get file from web server command”. Right now, you can do something like:

AT&G”subethasoftware.com/files/coco/readme.txt”

…and it gets that file from the web server, and you can capture it in a terminal program and save it to disk. This is fine for text programs, but trickier for binaries. We would need to write a custom program for that.

BUT, he supports XMODEM in the firmware, and I am hoping to see him do something like “AT&GX” that would grab a file from a remote server, then begin an XMODEM transfer to the CoCo. That would let us get anything we want from any website using XMODEM in whatever terminal program we have. Pretty cool.

Lots of fun stuff.

		— A