[Coco] two other things..

[James Dessart]

On 7/9/08, Chuck Youse <cyouse at serialtechnologies.com> wrote:

>  But I really think the only thing that makes using NitrOS-9 today
>  somewhat problematic is its lack of Ethernet/IP support.  I could
>  _totally_ use it as a workstation if it were networked.  And no, SLIP
>  doesn't count (too slow!).

I had been trying in the past to get ethernet going on the CoCo. My
main problem was that my hardware design skills are next to
non-existant. Added to that was the issue that at the time there were
no decent compilers that would work on a modern host.

However, there is now someone actively developing gcc6809, by the name
of Brian Dominy. Support for any variant of OS9 is missing in the
linker, however, and AFAIK, PIC code generation is also missing.

However, if that were dealt with, uIP is a nice little TCP/IP stack
that fits well inside 8K of RAM. I had managed to get it running
within an ATmega8 processor with a small http server included.

Ethernet hardware is pretty cheap these days, and a basic driver would
probably be fine. uIP already contains AVR compatible C code for an
RTL8019 controller. The RTL8091's address space is kinda large
considering the CoCo's IO address footprint, however.

-- 
James Dessart
<http://skwirl.com/cody/>