Thomas wrote: > I'm a bit confused about all this — how will this all work from > a technical point of view? I don't know what hardware ethernet > controllers tend to have... presumably the ethernet controller can > self assemble packets, then the z80 will run a TCP/IP stack and > the various HTTP protocol-related tasks? Are you planning to > claim well-defined pages and publish well-defined entry points/etc, > or just offer the TCP/IP and HTTP code for linking directly into > programs that want to use it?
Simply put, the ethernet controller is taking care of sending and receiving packets - it has an 8K buffer, and can flag when it was received a complete packet etc. Simon Owen has already done a great job on writing an Ethernet driver to take care of all the hardware initialising, setting up the buffers, sending and receiving packets between the SAM and the ethernet controller on the Trinity. Adrian's been working on porting the uIP TCP/IP stack to the SAM to process the packets to provide the TCP/IP connectivity and handling various protocols. From the chats I've had with Adrian the 'interface' for using the TCP/IP stack is probably the one area that's been the most thought out - coming up with a versatible and easy way of using the code in your own programs - from the ideas that he has come up with it should be straightforward for both machine code and BASIC programs to be able to use the stack. Colin ===== Quazar : Hardware, Software, Spares and Repairs for the SAM Coupe 1995-2009 - Celebrating 15 Years of developing for the SAM Coupe Website: http://www.samcoupe.com/
