Commander X16

Ok. So I talked with our KERNEL guy and we have some conclusions and while these things could change these should be the way things will work and should establish some goals and guidelines regarding networking.

The default device ID#2 will be the on board RS232 which is handled by the KERNEL and uses a few of the user port pins just like the C64 did. It remains to be seen. In theory you can get good speeds out of it.

However this does not conflict with the development of an IEC network device.

So this is a call for you the community to get involved on making said device and I will simply outline a few requests on how it works and features it should definitely have.

1: It needs to be seen as a disk drive with all the standard features you find on the SD2IEC. So that means time/date stamping, subdirectories, etc. it does not need D64 or other disk image support as those are more C64 related.

2: It needs to be able to support legacy IEC and JiffyDOS. This way it can be used on all Commodore 8 bit systems.

3: It needs to be able to understand AT Hayes type commands.

4: It needs to be able to connect to modern FTP file servers or something similar and treat them as drives.

5: It must be able to connect to BBS servers.

6: This device needs to handle all actual secure protocols such that the software running in the system doesn’t have to deal with them.

Suggestions: It has been mentioned that the ESP32 would be suitable, but we leave that to you guys. I suggest that its default device ID be 12 but that it can obviously be temporarily or permanently changed to any valid ID. Also it wouldn’t hurt if it’s designed such that you can send data and instructions to it via RS232.

As for development, you don’t need our system to be ready yet. It this works on a C64 it will work on our system. There are numerous open source projects that could make a good starting point.

Edit: There seems to be some confusion as to what the point of such a device is. So let me clarify. If I want to connect to a terminal it’s not as simple as sending a few bytes to a device. You have to maintain and keep track of a lot of seemingly ever changing security protocols. BBS services are about the simplest things to connect to as they are very primitive. So here’s a real world situation and use case. You could set up a simple server on your local network and have all your files stored on a modern computer and access them over your local network. But you could access a server anywhere. You could of course do BBS systems. And maybe that’s all people want and if that’s the case, then we can just use our built in software RS-232 and interface that to already existing WiModem devices. But what I’m proposing adds an abstraction layer that handles a lot of the overhead seamlessly and would allow you to connect to file servers with modern security. If it is easy to set up servers then that’s a strong basis to make an online support system for the platform using common software. To set this device up you just send a few commands.

As always relevant questions and ideas are welcome. I’m sure you’ll have many. Major important stuff will be added to this post.