[Coco] CocoNIC

[Brett Gordon]

Yup..I propose laying the ground work for such a thing, but not force
anyone into any direction. Just get a ROM image in there first, then let
people do what they want in the loaded ROM...and your idea sounds fine.
Not sure about passing info from the booter to the application ROM, but
thats probably unimportant for the time being.   Dont verve off the the
ugly mess nitros's booter has become.  Keep a clean interface, even if the
hdbdos rom has to redo some of the work that the pxe booter has done.

brett

On Sep 16, 2016 11:09 AM, "Barry Nelson" <barry.nelson at amobiledevice.com>
wrote:
>
> I think it would be useful to have a HDBDOS in ROM that uses the NIC to
talk to a DriveWire server over the becker port protocol. It could still
use DHCP or BOOTP to get an initial IP address. The DriveWire server name
and port to be contacted could be returned in the 64 byte "vendor" field of
the bootp response. The sequence would be to run a BOOTP client in an
initial ROM bank, get the client IP address and DriveWire server address,
store this information either some where in CoCo system RAM (the cassette
buffer?) or RAM on the NIC card, then transfer control to another ROM bank
that would run HDBDOS. If needed, that ROM bank could call out to another
bank for TCP/IP routines to send receive packets.
>