Re: CF Wifi on Apple 2 possible??

[heliboy2003@yahoo.com.tw]

> I have some wishful plans to reuse this designhttp://www.harbaum.org/till/spi2cf/index.shtmlalong with parts of Alex


Hi,

I've had the same idea a year ago to use a WiFi card for Apple II, but
I finally gave up that idea due to several reasons

(I happen to have many friends in the WiFi industry, so the following
comments are from various source in that industry)

1. As the author of SPI2CF mentioned, the hardware information of most
of the WiFi chips is not open to public, so you don't know how to
drive the chip.

2. There is no common interface specification on the command sent
through USB, CF or SDIO...., different chip vendor have their own
command set.

3. Chip vendors provide drivers for different OS and different IO, you
can do a reverse engineering to get the command set, but you can
imagine how hugh the task.

4. So the only possible way is to install the OS on your host
(microcontroller) and you need network driver and TCP/IP stack in
order to communicate with other WiFi device. But what kind of
microcontroller can give you this computing power to achieve a
satisfying data transfer rate?

I am not trying to say this is not impossible, but the effort is too
large to be done as a hobbist project and it requires many software
porting and testing IMHO.