[Coco] CoCoNet status

[Roger Taylor]

At 10:48 AM 12/19/2008, you wrote:
>Hi Roger.
>This project looks very promising, and I was thinking if you had any 
>idea of what the final price would be, and if there is any 
>requirement besides a serial CoCo <->PC cable. ( I seem to remember 
>you mentioned it can be straigth or twisted, right?)
>
>Thanks for your hard work,
>Diego


Diego,

I've had a test program running for 2 days straight on a CoCo 
2.  It's a BASIC program that constantly grabs the CoCo3.com front 
page and dumps the HTML to the 32-column screen.  It was at 2,759 
page reads when I broke out of the loop convinced that the SAVEW 
command was ready.  No rendering is done, just a dump of the HTML source.

As for ideas and possibilities, there is no limit.

Easily these things are possible:

Multi-player CoCo games (and in BASIC!)
A CoCo version of the CoCo Cafe.
Remote CoCo (another CoCo user controls your CoCo console)
Remote Control app (from another CoCo or PC on the web, turn on your 
local CoCo's tape motor, play sound, store data, give responses back, 
or whatever.

The trick is to use PHP or some other scripting language to handle 
the requests from one CoCo and readback the response data as the 
content.  Using ?variables=value modifiers in the URL, each CoCo 
could set values that the other CoCo(s) knows about, thus opening a 
new door for our machine.


The new bitbanger cable I'm making will be a 5 foot: female DB-9 to 
male 4-pin CoCo DIN, with molded shell and plastic thumbscrews for 
the DB-9 end.
I'm going to make a handful of snub cables so that people wanting to 
make their CoCo wireless can just attach one of those DB-9 to 
bluetooth transmitters which are completely plug-n-play, btw.


-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com