Rob Steinmetz wrote:
Lee Cremeans wrote:Rob Steinmetz wrote:Marinetti is a GS only package, It would be way cooler to have a board for the Apple ][.Yeah...I would defnitely want to support both 8 and 16-bit systems. The big sticking point with the 8-bit systems, though, is that there's no defined interface for using networking resources (that I know of). It all depends on what you want the card to do; as it stands, the design would have the same limitation as the LANceGS, namely that Ethernet support would have to be implemented on a program-by-program basis.Since you can only use one program at a time I don't really think of it as much of a limitation. Although access to server storage and network printers would be nice. The only way I can can conceive of doing a general interface is to have an intelligent card which presents those things as local devices.
I think that'd be neat, too, but then the card would have the rather nasty task of translating calls to a direct-access storage device (a SmartPort node, basically) or the printer port to whatever sharing protocol and file format we'd want to use. I'm not sure I'd want to tackle that. (Keep in mind that I'm just guessing about the nature of the thing, since I've not studied how the Workstation Card does it.)
For now, I'd like to keep it simple; just get basic Ethernet support working for those who want it. We can always figure out how to do more with it later.
I mainly see the NIC as being a way to access TCP/IP-based resources, such as Web servers, FTP and Telnet (all things Contiki can already do), though any suggestions on other capabilities it could provide (like, say, implementing EtherTalk for machines that can't do AToIP) are welcome.Porting Contiki, would be one way to do it.
I wonder how Chris is doing with this...I haven't heard much about it in a while. I've been meaning to grab the Contiki source and try compiling it, but it's been a while.
I'm also wondering how the old Apple II Workstation Card handled things...I seem to remember it having some intelligence of its own.IIRC the card had its own 6502 processor. I think the main processor would get too bogged down for really fancy stuff.
I wonder what sort of software interface it had to the rest of the system; it had network boot capability (I saw it in action at my brother's school circa 1991-1992), so I'm thinking it treated at least one of the shares as a SmartPort device.
-lee