I've got some great ideas for projects - I'm sure we all do!

But a needed starting point is some kind of common network stack that we could use. There's MagerValp's http://www.paradroid.net/ip65/ and Six's DLoCNet.

I'd prefer to use Six's stack as it supports both the RR-Net and the ETH64, but I haven't seen any updates in months.

Basically, I want to be able to send/receive ICMP and UDP.

I'm curious what the rest of you are doing - did you use one of the above, or did you roll your own?

Well, I did at first start on my own Stack project but when I reached UDP level I realized that I'm not even half ways to a finished TCP layer and the size of the source was already becoming painful to handle in TASM. So I put the project on ice.

Meanwhile came Doc.Bacardi's HTTPLoad and MagerValp's ip65, and later on Six's DlocNet and now Grahams TFR. All handling (more or less) UDP level. Then I realized that we're all just trying to re-invent the wheel. As we all know, Adam Dunkels is way ahead of us and has been all the time with uIP and Contiki. So I decided to have a go with uIP and so far the progress has been good and I'm planning to release a beta of my first tool on the S:T LARS MEETING next weekend

I know uIP is far from suitable for many projects. It's big and bulky and is written in C but if you need TCP there's really no other option at this moment. Unless Doc. Bacardi would evolve the HTTPLoader stack just a little bit more so it could be used more independently... *hint* *hint*

Even standalone UDP would be handy, you could do a lot with that. Did you get UDP working with your effort?

I wish I lived closer to Sweden! Despite my obnoxiously Swedish name (Leif Bloomquist), I've never even been there. The party sounds cool, we have nothing like that here.

Yes, I did some rough tests with UDP and it worked but I never got around to implement an API before I put the project on ice. I haven't tried MagerValps ip65 yet but it handles UDP and the API seems easy to use



Yes, I was actually wondering if there was a swedish connection

Canada is a bit far I agree, if you go to europe, you should try to time it with a good C64 party

I was never able to compile ip65 or the example programs because of bugs in cc65/ca65. But it looks like they've been fixed now.

And? How was the party? Let's see what you've come up with!

Actually I didn't get finished in time for the party so I decided to finish it on monday (yesterday) as there's just some minor things to fix, but yesterday I woke up with strong fever, a banging head ache and evil stuff coming from my nose and lungs, so spent all day in bed. Today I've been trying to code a little but the fever is still too strong On the bright side it was a good party. Around 30 ppl showed up and some fresh demo, gfx and music releases were made. Check it out on http://noname.c64.org/csdb/event/?id=1013 while I'm tending to my flu...

I'm curious, among the RRnet developers, how far away are we from an RS232 type INPUT/OUTPUT routine which could be called from basic?
Something along the lines of a terminal INPUT/OUTPUT after establishing a telnet/shell connection. Something like this could be readly adapted for many uses and perhaps push the RRnet into mainstream.

Oldbit

At the moment I would say pretty FAR.. it requires making a completely interrupt driven network polling and TCP/IP handling solution that's not interfering with the normal routines and at the same time can act on BASIC interpretation. Provided that all this will be solved, I just don't think there would be much free BASIC memory left to use... But then again people usually accuse me for being pessimistic

When thinking about it, Doc Bacardi's HTTP load actually incorporates a kernal loader routine. I guess he put most of the code in ROM though. That would significantly increase the amount of available RAM, but does require a properly flashed Retro Replay ofcourse. But if I would attempt to fully integrate a TCP/IP stack with BASIC I would start looking at the Doc's code.

Could you do something with SYS calls?

i.e. POKE the IP address to connect to into the right registers, then do a SYS call to open the connection. Then POKE the data to send into another area in memory and SYS to send it. If you have an interrupt running in the background to receive packets, you could PEEK a register to see if any data has arrived.

Error handling etc. for TCP would be tricky though. This approach might be easier with UDP?

Yes, you could interface the stack entirely with poke/peek and sys calls. TCP requires more processing by the stack so yes, UDP would probably be easier, on the other hand UDP relays on the application to do the flow control. It's all depending on what requirements you have for your application. It is also possible to do all the hardware and stack polling manually (via sys calls) from the application. It would be very slow though. But if the application requires processing just a single packet at a time it would probably be sufficient.

What is it with you Americans and basic? =

I'm Canadian , but I'll bite anyway...

I think we're doing different things. Jeff (Oldbit) is interested in doing lots of string manipulation/parsing and so on for his application, and speed isn't really an issue, so BASIC is a better choice.

We didn't have good assemblers/monitors or tools over here until recently. All I had when I was younger was the Programmer's Reference Guide and the Epyx Fastload cartridge.

There weren't many good learning materials for ML - the Commodore magazines (Gazette, Ahoy! etc) only published BASIC programs. Well they had some ML games but they were just hex dumps

I'm just stacking (pun intended) my reply at the tail of this thread for the sake of not starting a new one, because this is the same topic. I've been asking around for over a year for a TCP/IP stack and nothing has happened. I think it's really dumb that everyone is writing their own code to use RR-Net on hardware level. Then again, I don't believe implementing an actual stack is a good idea on a low end platform anyway, but a common "library" that we could all use for LAN operations is definitely needed. I would like to do some network-apps, but I have really zero interest to start learning to program the CS8900 - I did actually even print the datasheet 1.5 years ago, but it's almost 200 pages so I haven't even started to read it... Since some people have already played with UDP, is it possible for you to make this - so that I can just link it to my application and do some JSRs to deal with RR-Net?

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