[Coco] CoCoNet before Xmas

[Roger Taylor]

Greetings all!

The work has been intense, the hours long, and the EPROM 
eraser/burner working overtime in my tests.

CoCoNet 1.0 is about a week from being finalized and released.

CoCoNet is a Disk BASIC 1.1 ROM replacement and is compatible with 
any CoCo 3 or CoCo 1/2 with Extended BASIC.

The 16K EPROM will fit in both my Deluxe Wireless RS-232 Pak and the 
new Drive Pak, or EPROM Pak.  You just need to get the EPROM booted 
somehow and you're set.
The least thing you'd need is a bitbanger cable and an EPROM pak/board.

Just a few things you could do using CoCoNet:
- Auto-boot into a Drive Pak, PC or web OS-9 system
- Remote virtual floppy disks over bitbanger cable, RS-232 Pak, or 
bluetooth (Deluxe Wireless Pak)
- MicroSD (Drive Pak) virtual disks, 1GB of storage any way you like
- Huge OS-9 "hard drives" on the Drive Pak or via remote PC/web
- Automatically run AUTOBOOT.BAS from Drive 0 on CoCo powerup, from 
the Drive Pak, PC or web!!
	From AUTOBOOT.BAS, you can make the program boot up OS-9 or whatever 
you want, even launch a live web service.
- Grab web files and save them to a mounted remote disk using one 
Disk BASIC command
	(a front-end HTTP GET command)
- Web services on power-up of the CoCo (wireless, wired, bitbanger)

Real 1793 controller disks
2GB MicroSD card (Drive Pak) disks (0-255) per partition, with 
virtually unlimited partitions and disks!
Bitbanger port disks using the CoCoNet server on your PC and a serial cable
Tandy RS-232 Pak + cable, or Deluxe Wireless RS-232 Pak remote disks 
over bluetooth
  (CoCoNet can mount remote PC or web disks!)

All disks are compatible with the standard Disk BASIC 1.1 set of 
commands.  In other words:
BACKUP, COPY, KILL, RENAME, SAVE, LOAD, OPEN, CLOSE, PUT, GET, etc. 
between all disks types.
(But you can't write to web disks).

On startup, CoCoNet automatically mounts each drive type for 0-3 in 
an order of importance based on the devices you have plugged 
in.  From BASIC you can remount the drives.
You can do this from the autoboot.bas program, for example.

Folks, all sorts of things are possible, and the CoCoNet "ROM" can be 
booted from whatever device you own that accepts a 27128 EPROM.
You just have to use your imagination, like when you're looking at a 
set of BASIC commands and ask somebody, "what can I do with 
that?".  Pretty much everything.


 From DOS you can mount the different disk types in any order and see 
the current mounts using the enhanced DRIVE command.
For example, typing DRIVE with no parameters would give a listing such as:
 >DRIVE [ENTER]

DRIVE 0: UDRIVE DISK 000
DRIVE 1: ACIA
DRIVE 2: BITBANGER
DRIVE 3: 1793

 >DRIVE 0,#254 [ENTER] (change to MicroDrive disk #254 - NitrOS-9 Level II)
 >DRIVE [ENTER]

DRIVE 0: UDRIVE DISK 254
DRIVE 1: ACIA
DRIVE 2: BITBANGER
DRIVE 3: 1793

DOS  (boots into NitrOS-9)

By the way, my AUTOBOOT.BAS program checks what type of CoCo is in 
use and boots OS-9 Level 1 or 2 automatically.  This means, you can 
take a Drive Pak and stick it in almost any CoCo and boot into "OS-9" 
right on power-up.

On powerup, once the drive types have been chosen and mounted for 
0-3, each drive will be scanned for an AUTOBOOT.BAS program, with the 
first one found being RUN automatically.
You could have an AUTOBOOT program on your PC, the web, the Drive 
Pak, and real disk drive.  It doesn't have to be the same program code.

Telnet is also handled by the CoCoNet server and using the right CoCo 
client software, you could connect to a remote Telnet server from 
BASIC or OS-9.
Again, if you can auto boot, it means you can do anything CoCoNet can 
do right after power-up.

-- 
~ Roger Taylor