[Coco] Driverwire server

[Roger Taylor]

At 11:46 AM 3/15/2009, you wrote:
>Boisy and Roger,
>
>It has put a lump in my throat to see you are still talking to each other and
>sharing knowledge. I was so concerned after that last exchange. Our community
>is way too small to absorb splitting the church. No response is necessary, I
>do not was a rehash of the subject. I only wanted express my relief. Both of
>you (and Mark) are doing more for the preservation of the CoCo than anyone
>could expect.

I saw it for what it was, a debate betweem Mark and me.  Over the 
years, I've been in many but read WAY more that I wasn't in.


As for Boisy's idea about matching some of the low-level protocol 
bits for our systems, I have one for him as well.


The existing virtual sector DSKCON routines in our systems can double 
as virtual ports for both DriveWire and CoCoNet.

A few POKEs to Disk BASIC that removes the ?FC ERROR if 
SECTOR=0  could allow both DriveWire and CoCoNet to support 256 
virtual ports and become networking systems.  The CoCo EPROM wouldn't 
have to be replaced every time there's an upgrade to the network features.

Take the existing DSKI$ and DSKO$ commands.  As long as the sector 
parameter is 0, the server would intercept and not deal with actual 
virtual disk files, but instead send/receive what's in the virtual 
port buffers.

DSKI$ VP,0,0,A$,B$

Whatever the server has in it's outgoing buffer for port #VP would be 
received into A$/B$.  The first byte of A$ would be the length of the 
valid portion of the rest of A$/B$.  ?ASC(A$) reveals the length of 
the valid data

A very crude example where BASIC and the PC server do most of the work.

10 CLEAR 1000
20 A$=STRING$(128,32):B$=A$ ' prefill 256 bytes of ASCII 32 (spaces)
30 C$="HTTPGET HTTP://WWW.COCO3.COM"
40 MID$(A$,1,LEN(C$))=C$
50 DSKO$ 100,0,0,A$,B$ ' send command over port 100
60 DSKI$ 0,0,0,A$,B$ ' stream in the HTML file of coco3.com
70 D$=A$+B$:PRINT MID$(D$,2,ASC(A$))
90 GOTO 60

-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com