[Coco] NitrOS-9 Tools for the CoCoIOn Ethernet Card

[Michael Furman]

Hi folks! I picked up a Computer Conect CoCoIOn card at CoCo Fest and this past week I have been hard at work hacking up some code to make the card work.  So far I have written two utility programs for the card which run under NitrOS-9: ccio and ping.  

The first utility ccio reads a config file /DD/SYS/interfaces and configures the card MAC and IP addresses.  After running “ccio -i”  you should be able to ping the card from another computer.

The second utility ping allows your CoCo to ping other hosts.  After initializing the card you can run “ping 8.8.8.8” and you will see the replies come back.  The displayed “time” is not really any real units of time, it is simply the number of times the code busy-wait-loop goes around waiting for the reply.  Usually pinging a host on the local network is t=0 or t=1, and my example 8.8.8.8 was between t=90 to t=110, but this will vary depending on your Internet connection. PLEASE NOTE that there is no DNS lookup, so you have to use something like nslookup or https://www.nslookup.io to get the IP address first.

Both of these utilities are available on my cocoio-dw GitHub repository in the tests directory.  There is a disk image there “cocoio-tools.dsk” as well as all the source code and Makefile.

https://github.com/n6il/cocoio-dw/tree/main/tests

Lastly, I have started work on a BSD-Style Socket Networking stack which interfaces with the CoCoIO card.  I’ll provide future updates when there is additional progress to report.