[Coco] RS232 to WiFi/Ethernet

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 30, 2018, at 1:12 PM, Ron Klein <ron at kdomain.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Allen,
> 
>> On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 12:23 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Question... does this work for RS-DOS? All of the stuff Roger and I have
>> been doing has so far been under Ultimaterm and other DISK BASIC terminal
>> programs.
>> 
>> 
> Good question and I do not have that answer.  I believe it will work with
> NitrOS9 and have used it in Fuzix.  I've also used William Astle's lwwire
> (which is another great option).

There’s no reason why it *can’t* be done, but like most things that aren’t games, it usually just gets done on OS-9 since that is much easier to work with ;-)

What all does DW offer for RS-DOS users? Does it do anything beyond just acting like a virtual floppy or hard drive? I know there is support for sockets, clock, MIDI, printer, etc. but can you LLIST and print from RS-DOS?

> I'm all for having a common network solution for our Coco's.  The trade off
> with this is we may lose compatibility with emulated Coco systems.  Does
> anyone know if the ESP8266 has been virtualized where it could be added to
> MAME, XRoar, etc..?  While one could continue to use the Becker port with
> Drivewire, I'm sure programs would be written that use commands specific to
> the ESP8266  module and we would want to maintain that compatibility for
> emulation scenarios.

Heh, for 100% compatibility, you’d just plug up the $8.99 USB ESP8266 module and connect the RS232 pak to it.

> Even though I was advocating for Drivewire / lwwire, I'm still very
> interested to see the idea of a common, low cost serial WiFi solution be
> successful.

Yes, and NOTHING we already have goes away, so it’s just more, not less.

And, if someone wanted to take a stab at it, you could write DriveWire protocol on the ESP8266. Instead of acting files on a PC, it could access files remotely...

		— A