[Coco] RS232 to WiFi/Ethernet

[Ron Klein]

Hi Allen,

On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 12:23 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:

>
> Question... does this work for RS-DOS? All of the stuff Roger and I have
> been doing has so far been under Ultimaterm and other DISK BASIC terminal
> programs.
>
>
Good question and I do not have that answer.  I believe it will work with
NitrOS9 and have used it in Fuzix.  I've also used William Astle's lwwire
(which is another great option).



> Another thing is that these hardware solutions are hopefully going to give
> a "real CoCo" the same networking capabilities of the FPGA CoCos, so we can
> all still talk to each other.
>

I'm all for having a common network solution for our Coco's.  The trade off
with this is we may lose compatibility with emulated Coco systems.  Does
anyone know if the ESP8266 has been virtualized where it could be added to
MAME, XRoar, etc..?  While one could continue to use the Becker port with
Drivewire, I'm sure programs would be written that use commands specific to
the ESP8266  module and we would want to maintain that compatibility for
emulation scenarios.

Plugging in a RS232 cable is also likely much easier than getting Drivewire
going and setup. It looks like it can be done for about $4 (!!!) and all
you’d do is connect about four wires that just slide on over pins... no
soldering! :) (Plus use a USB power supply which most of us probably have,
and a serial cable. I use my Drivewire cable via the bitbanger port.)

Even though I was advocating for Drivewire / lwwire, I'm still very
interested to see the idea of a common, low cost serial WiFi solution be
successful.