New to forum. Any interest in X16 BBSing?
New to forum. Any interest in X16 BBSing?
I've been following this project for a few months. Recently started getting more into learning the system, and messing with some assembly on the emulator. I had a thought and wondered what interest here would be... The thought is actually 3 related ideas... 1) A BBS (geared for X16 and software sharing/etc), 2) RS232-Wifi Adapter (ESP32?), and a 3) simple terminal software. Is there any interest in these 3 different areas? Has any work been done related to these areas (not to reinvent the wheel)? Perhaps it's more nostalgia factor then anything, but the thought of easily connecting via telnet to a X16 geared BBS to download software sounds interesting to me. (versus downloading on a computer from the web and transferring to the SD card, etc.)
New to forum. Any interest in X16 BBSing?
There have been many discussions about the topic of connectivity between the X16 and the outside world. They've been in the How To section, the Hardware Help section, the Feature Request section, and the General Chat section. Probably a few others I haven't mentioned, too.
The general consensus is that people would like to see such products, but until the hardware design is finalized, it's going to be difficult to see whether any of them will work.
We do know that Kevin has put most of the signals of one of the VIAs on the user port header on the motherboard. The VIA isn't the greatest solution for serial communication, but it's what we've got, and in theory could support pretty high data rates once we've got a board that can run at full 8MHz speed. I seem to recall a theoretical upper bound of something like 19200bps?
There have been a number of very detailed practical discussions on building hardware to attach to the user port and use its parallel output to feed a UART, and get even higher data rates, up to 115200bps. Other discussions have talked about using the expansion slots and either pumping data through the expansion slot interface or else doing some sort of DMA and/or bus mastering... solutions such as ESP32-based WiFi would fall under this category.
As far as software goes, well, again, the exact details of terminal/client software will have to wait until we know how the hardware is going to work, and have support for it in the emulator. Even with this issue, there has been at least one proof of concept for client software that uses a hack — an ingenious one, IMHO — to simulate a disk file that is actually a buffer for data transfer, just to get around those limitations of the emulator.
New to forum. Any interest in X16 BBSing?
As of yet, there is no RS-232 hardware for the Commander X16 and so no serial port in the emulator. That means that while we can discuss BBSing all day long, there's no way to write or test any software to connect to a BBS.
yes - there has been some discussion, mostly centered around ways to add a serial port, The official story is that the User port will provide a "bit banged" serial port (meaning the bits will be generated by software, limiting the speed to something like 19200bps), and there has been discussion about adding either an internal or external UART to the system, using various means. You'll have to search the forums to find the places we've discussed it