[Coco] atari USB device

David Hazelton davehazelton at access-4-free.com
Thu Nov 25 22:26:33 EST 2004


James Dessart wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Mark McDougall wrote:
> 
> 
>>Of course, USB ethernet is also a pretty interesting option. Anyone feel 
>>like porting Samba to the CoCo? ;) Or bluetooth? ;)
> 
> 
> USB ethernet adds a layer of complexity, when you can get suitable
> ethernet chips for pretty cheap. In both cases, you have to write drivers.
> Drivers for a simple ethernet controller chip are easy to find for 8-bit
> microcontrollers, but drivers for USB ethernet devices would likely rely
> on APIs that would only be available on 32-bit, modern systems.
> 
> If we're going to be porting a file-sharing protocol over ethernet, we'd
> also need a TCP/IP stack. But given the state of Samba, I think it'd be
> much more sensible to write an NFS client for OS-9, but even then OS-9's
> dependence on RBF would need to be broken first. This, of course,
> pre-supposes the aforementioned TCP/IP stack.
> 
> Which is an entirely different ball of wax. From my own researches for a
> CoCo-hosted TCP/IP stack, uIP is the best bet. It's small, easily
> portable, and there are ethernet chip drivers that can be easily ported
> once the hardware's in place. The API is a bit difficult to grasp, but
> then again, where else are you going to find a TCP/IP stack that fits into
> 6 KB or so of RAM?
> 
> I have some ideas on how a TCP/IP stack could be integrated into OS-9, but
> not enough knowledge of OS-9 itself to put it in myself. Then there's the
> question of making network device drivers for Ethernet and perhaps SLIP.
> PPP is pretty much out of the question, if you want to use the computer
> for something other than a single, simple, networked application. PPP
> takes up a lot of code space, and doesn't give you much in the process.
> 
> James
> 
> 
There is a early version of Samba Client I think 1.4 on RTSI for OSK and 
ISP (The original IP stack for OSK).  I couldn't get it to work at my 
old job, though I did get NFS to work on that machine, but it had 
problems with Solaris, maybe that was Samba's problem also.  I know that 
this was a 68040 based VME Machine.  KAQ9 is a TCP/IP Stack but done in 
an application mode instead of a Driver/Module mode.  I really wish my 
MM/1B and Coco was on my network.


~David Hazelton



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