Re: What became of SLIP for Contiki?

[Oliver Schmidt <ol.sc@web.de>]

Hi,

>I have the apple2 binaries compiling fine now (but can't test them).

Why, there are plenty of Apple2 emulators and the cc65 docs even come
with a step-by-step tutorial on running own code with them.

>I haven't been able to locate the apple specific rs232 libs. Where are
>they?

The cc65 rs232 support consists of two parts:

- A hardware independent driver kernel linked statically with the
application.
- A hardware specific driver loaded dynamically from disk by the
driver kernel or the application.

The driver kernel API is declared in serial.h. I'd propose to get the
cc65 source and use the API implementation as documentation.

The loadable drivers for the Apple2 are called a2[e].ssc.ser.

Contiki for the Apple2 comes in two variants. The "high end" variant
now supports the mouse and therefore has general interrupt support
built-in. The mouse driver is just the same kind of loadable driver as
the rs232 driver so check out the CVS source for the mouse driver
handling to get an idea on how to load the driver from the application
instead of the driver kernel (to save sapce).

>That isn't so bad. Because I haven't located them yet, could you tell
>me if they utilise the firmware or just direct hardware I/O?

Direct hardware I/O.

>I was going to write a horrible kludge lib for apple2 SSC IO, but I
>guess I don't have to.

Indeed.

>Is the (n)kb of Aux memory (64k in my case) utilised by cc64 and/or
>contiki?

Check out the README.TXT in CVS.

>If not, is there any reason why the extra buffer couldn't live
>there? I hate to see perfectly good RAM go to waste!

The buffer can live there very well, it's just that Contiki wouldn't
be able to use it anymore ;-)

The latest Contiki "high end" variant is that tight on memory anymore
(because of AUX RAM usage ;-) so there you can allocate an additional
1024 buffer without loosing significant functionality.

Best, Oliver