Commander X16

I dunno if it's been suggested, I thought about it a bit yesterday and I came to the conclusion, why not plug an ESP8266 or an ESP32 on whatever ends up being the serial port and use Hayes AT commands over device #2? That would be very inexpensive and would be very simple, ESP chips goes for something like $2.

It's already a thing on the Commodore 64 and there's a few examples there: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/WLAN

The idea has certainly been floated around in the past on the Facebook group. No idea if anyone has made any serious moves in that direction yet, though. I seem to recall that the last time it came up, the mention got drowned beneath people who were interested in trying to communicate with classic landline modems. (Would old landline modems still work reliably on today's IP infrastructure phone system? I suppose if faxes still work, then old modems must too...)

I imagine the firmware from existing Wi-Fi modems could certainly be reused, now to figure out which pinout to use and I think it's pretty much what was discussed in the RS-232 thread. You'd tie the TX and RX pins on the ESP to whatever works on the X16.

As of classic landline modems, ISPs still provide 56k access, but it would only work on the standard landlines, since cellphones and IP phones perform lossy compression that would mess with the data.

That already exists and it will absolutely work as is.


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Yup. These are easy to find, and there are two I recommend: the WiModem232 or the Gurumodem.

The WiModem232 works fairly well, and is basically exactly what the name suggests... a WiFi modem. 

There's another device called the Gurumodem. I'm planning on ordering one of these soon. The Gurumodem has one feature the WiModem doesn't have - an SD card socket, which can act as local storage. This isn't really useful for the Commander, but it can act as a handy way to get files onto a vintage 8-bit system.