[Coco] WiFi modem.

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 18, 2018, at 11:43 PM, Steve Pedersen <666jacktheknife666 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The problem is hooking this up to a real Coco you need a high-speed
> Hardware flow control serial port unless you are content with using the bit
> Banger 9600 BPS.

CoCo 1/2 was pretty much limited to 1200 baud. I’m not sure how much faster the CoCo 3 could be pushed, but I thought Ultimaterm did 2400 reliably through the bitbanger.

Right now, anyone with an RS232 pack, can buy a device that goes from RS232 to Internet… They are readily available, and can call out via Telnet to a remote online BBS, or you can make them listen and answer and connect — so any CoCo BBS could be online. WiFi/Ethernet modems.

With the advent of the ESP8266, and it being a $2 part, WiFi is now super cheap and the parts to make something that does this is probably not even $10.

But, if no one has Paks, but wants to get a machine online, a cartridge makes sense. By having it emulate or use 6551, mapped to the RS232 pan, then any program for RS-DOS or OS-9 that uses the RS232 pak can now get online. 

A simple park like this, with the ability to plug in a Bluetooth (for those who want it), or ESP8266 (for those who want it), or both, basically means we can now interface to anything we want.

With firmware that looks like a modem, it’s super simple to just connect CoCo to CoCo over the internet and exchange data — could use XMODEM, etc. just like dialup. But to do fancier things like FTP, that takes either more firmware in the WiFi part (doable) or CoCo software that does the protocol, using the WiFi part just for sockets.

How much would you pay? What is an RS232 Pak worth, and would it be cheaper to make a pack with the connectors (versus RS232 connector and parts) and let the end-user do whatever they want with it?

		— A