This Week In FujiNet is being released the weekend after Thanksgiving. It’s covering Week 46 and Week 47. With Thanksgiving taking up a big chunk of 47 you would think things would have slowed down, ha, apparently the holidays have motivated quite a few people to make good advances on the FujiNet project just this past week. Very interesting things continue to happen each day and it’s always fascinating to see what combination of questions, conjecture, coding and solutions spur on advances in one platform vs. another.

This posting covers the following:

Week 46 – Nov. 13 -19th
Week 47 – Nov. 20 – 23rd (half of the week)

Quick Hits:

• I was a guest on Antic, the Atari Podcast where I was able to talk about all sorts of interesting FujiNet developments and progress, hopefully reaching even more people that don’t read these posts or wander into the Facebook group. Listen to ANTIC Episode 93 – All FujiNet, All The Time at the site linked or wherever you grab podcasts.
• AppleII FujiNet now can print to the FujiNet Virtual Printer (implementation led by Thom Cherryhomes)
• DiamondGOS for Atari got cc65 bindings from Thom Cherryhomes for easier development
• AppleII Fujinet has Real Time Clock support – reads time from the FujiNet (contributed by ivanizag)
• The modem implementation was untangled from the original Atari code (sio) and moved into it’s own lib (contributed by markjfisher)
• JeffP continued pushing into Disk II support for AppleII

Housekeeping

Where to purchase a device:

• FujiNet Official Site
• Buy A FN Device from Vintage Computer Center
• Buy A FN Device from Arcade Shopper
• Purchase a FujiNet device from TBA – The Brewing Academy
• Antonio @masteries on AA Sells FujiNets from Spain – now Apple2, Atari & ADAM

You can find more information about the FujiNet project

• GH Project Wiki Pages for Devices Hacking & Coding
• Join our Discord and learn and contribute
• The FujiNet Facebook Group has interesting discussions

Check Mr. Robot’s Live Fujinet Server Status – where to connect with your FN

FujiNet Flasher – keep your FN up2date for best results.

Videos

• AppleII + fujinet by unmotivated dev – a very nice run thru of Fujinet on Apple2 setting up a ASM env using all four disk slots on the FujiNet
• Playing with the LEDS on the new FujiNet/Meatloaf hardware – a short by Jamie Idolpx

Platforms

ADAM

RonKlein has been on a huge roll programming for the ADAM. Using some samples from TCH he has rolled out a more polished netcat app for ADAM, which will include a nice directory of hosts to connect to with your ADAM. He’s been working on 64 column support for maximum screen density and scroll speed.

Ron Klein: Yes, it looks like a mess. Learning about colors, screen positions, transparency, etc.. Most of this is through trial and error and the moment.

Ron Klein: I think I can get 64 columns to work. Network support has been added to this.
mozzwald: Looks like a real adam application 
Thom Cherryhomes: nice 

Apple II

A lot is going on in the AppleII space these past two weeks. A number of new FujiNet devices were introducted to the Apple and are either available or very close to being available.

A video to watch – the best run down of Apple2 Hardware on the tubes. Refresh your Apple2 knowledge:
Stephen Edwards “Inside the Apple II”

ivanizag popped in and provided a real time clock for the FN device.

ivanizag: Right. There is code on how to use the Fujinet RTC directly or via the Prodos Driver there. Using a ProDOS driver is tricky. It have to be the first .system file on the volume. The code of the driver and more general info on prodos drivers is here https://github.com/a2stuff/prodos-drivers. And there is a built driver binary in https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-apps/blob/master/clock/apple2/dist.apple2/fn.clock.system

jeffp continued his work to re-factor the IWM code in order to allow DISKII support for the FujiNet.

Jeff Piepmeier: ok, got the file i/o calls out of disk.cpp and into mediatypepo.cpp
Jeff Piepmeier: that’s all for now, but one step closer to woz support

A couple of new members came up and were able to order the two extra A2 boards that Moz had left- AdamMcG and jtsom both ordered and received their boards and started to setup and help test and code.

Thom Cherryhomes ported over the Mastodon client to Apple2.

Thom Cherryhomes kicked of the Apple2 printer support with this:

Thom Cherryhomes: @here To anyone who might want to pick this up:
If we were to specify the commands (and how) to talk to the virtual modem and printer over smartport, could somebody write code to put on ROM (and potentially on a card) to intercept calls from slots 1 and 2 and send them to the printer and modem respectively? 

Some furious coding and a few days later…

Thom Cherryhomes: writes a “dumb typewriter” program
if i’ve implemented the device right, all that is needed is to simply call a write command
so should be Really freakin easy to cram into say a 256 byte rom

Thom Cherryhomes: @jeffmazur printer is up.
So basically, any compatibility ROM can just send a smartport WRITE command to the printer device, and it will get rendered using the currently running virtual printer.

So:
* Find smartport dispatcher, use it to…
* scan for the device named PRINTER, get its device #
* send WRITEs to it any time you need to print something

jeffmazur: I’ll take a stab at it later today. The first step is unnecessary since the dispatcher in the //c is known. Getting the device number could be done in the p1init routine and sending characters in the p1write routine. Looks like there’s plenty of room to replace the existing routines with the FN ones.

Jeff Mazur began to write a sample ROM for IIC with collab from TCH and robj.

jeffmazur: OK. I have a patched ROM but no way to see if it works!
robj: the IIc+ seems to repeat the unit#1 as unit#5, so then from then on, the rest of the devices are numbered 1 higher on it

Then NorthF popped in with some help and fixes.

NorthF: I have attached an improved version of sp. c (and dumbtype.c).
The change is minimal.
I think the sp_find_printer() function can’t find the printer device properly because there is a problem with the comparison logic of the device name.
For comparison, the device name is the same length, and if the name is different, 0 is returned and the device check failed.
However, in the IIcPlus environment, there is a “NETWORK” with the same length (7) characters before “PRINTER” and determines that the device check failed before checking “PRINTER”.
The above parts have been corrected by sp. c and dumbtype. c.
I tested the operation with IIcPlus and IIc, but I didn’t test with IIGS or IIe.

After some firmware fixes from TCH to the Apple2…

jeffmazur: YAY!! That fixed it. Am printing now with PR#1. Need to check some other programs (PrintShop)

A lot of work between Thom CH, JeffM, RobJ, JeffP to sort out printing to a slot, getting at least one virtual printer setup (Imagewriter II was chosen) and lots of trial and error…

jeffmazur: Here is the binary image you can burn to a 32K (E)EPROM to replace the //c system ROM. Or load into ROMXc if you have one.
I’ve done testing from BASIC, cataloging disks, CopyIIPlus, etc. All works, but be patient! Helps to watch the debug to know when it’s done printing (else, wait for the cursor or other indication that it’s done). PR#0 then will get you back.

andy diller: You need a new ROM to print? or is that part of the grappler?

Thom Cherryhomes: you need rom code in the slot 1 address space to redirect to the fujinet printer @jeffmazur wrote one for the //c (not //c+ yet)and we will need to make a card for slotted apple 2’s containing a ROM which does this. again, an artifact of the simple fact that we are the only people on planet earth who have ever tried to make a smartport character device, let alone a handful of them.

jeffmazur: For those following along at home, here are the new patches to allow PR#1 printing on the //c. Still need to work out CR/LF and graphics handling. Hopefully, these will happen on the FN side so this ROM should not need to be changed (except to add a PRINTER unit# scan routine if it can’t be made static).

FN_PATCHES_V2.RTF

Printing support will be am amazing feature for the Apple2 FujiNet. Check back in upcoming posting or just go and join the Discord now and take direct part in these developments!

Apple II Disk Image Formats

robj: One thing to consider with disk images is that only images that contain Prodos on them, will boot from a smartport. If they have the older DOS 3.3 on them, then they will not boot.
robj: so then if you add support for .do or .dsk images, then there can be the assumption that they will work, when depending on the content they may not. (hope that makes sense)
Thom Cherryhomes: so the smartport emulators can’t boot dos 3.3 at all…
robj: no, it did not exist when the original dos was introduced.
robj: this is why floppy emulation is good to have, then this allows any older based floppy images to work
Thom Cherryhomes: OK
Thom Cherryhomes: what a mess.
…
robj: That’s another reason why Totalreplay is so good, its allowed a lot of dos based games to run as they have been ported over to run from prodos, then added in to the collection.

Lots of discussion of .PO prodos and .DO DOS disk images, formats and what this all means for FujiNet support…

Thom Cherryhomes: again, DOS 3.3 does not have any code to talk to smartport at all- RWTS is hard-coded for Disk ][.
andy diller: ok, so DISKII support is another way to do this.
Thom Cherryhomes: yes. this is why diskII support is important. Apple never made a 5.25″ smartport drive
andy diller: yeah i saw that nice graphic that was posted.
Thom Cherryhomes: we’re going to have to do some interesting gymnastics to make this stuff appear to just work. and I’m gonna say it now, we may wind up making our own Liron clone.
mozzwald: Fujiron?
Thom Cherryhomes: 
Thom Cherryhomes: mostly because the Yellowstone is comparatively an expensive card.
mozzwald: this is all getting very complex
Thom Cherryhomes: welcome to apple2– everything on Apple2 is an exercise in gymnastics. Just be glad you never had to write any graphics code in hi res (everything very non-linear, so you need tables to plot to the screen really fast)

To wrap up the two weeks for Apple, Thom CH pushed a bunch of fixes for CONFIG on the Apple2 resolving a number of little issues that had been building up over time.

Updates:

• CONFIG is now a SYSTEM file. The loader isn’t needed.
• there is now a delay after getting wifi status. This should allow for wifi to transition to a valid state after SSID is set
• Added PUSH ANY KEY to Apple2 FujiNET CONFIG Startscreen

Atari

A lot of things going on in the Atari platform these past few weeks. It’s a big section. The week started with Thom Cherryhomes (TCH) producing a nice APX DLI screen for a project…

Thom Cherryhomes: Working on #Ataribit #FujiNet APX Catalog splash screen. Decided to leave the blue bar on the right off the final, because it only appears in one rendered graphic, and not in any real APX material. On to the core program. #RetroComputing

Playfield color 0 renders the APX
Playfield color 1 renders the second stripe
Playfield color 2 renders the fourth stripe
Playfield color 3 renders the sixth stripe.
Player color 0 renders the first stripe
Player color 1 renders the third stripe
Player color 2 renders the fifth stripe
Player color 3 renders the seventh stripe

A DLI is used under APX to flip back in the system charset for 24 scanlines, before flipping back to the custom charset.

GUIs for the Atari

GEOS 2.0 was ported to the Atari…

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/343639-geos-20-for-8-bit-atari/

Andy Diller (me) put the GEOS ATRs up on his TNFS server and posted about it. There was no disk support so while FN could boot the images there was no provisions yet to save or open documents in GEOS.

Some discussion about using an Atari mouse (or Amiga) to control the cursor in GEOS.

Thom Cherryhomes: Amiga/ST are both QAM encoded mice, with a slightly different table.
flashjazzcat: You have to recompile it to use an Amiga mouse (see ‘Building’): https://github.com/ytmytm/geos-atari
On its face, that should mean ST mouse support is trivial to add, although I found it necessary to sample the mouse at 1KHz to get it to track properly in my GOS. I haven’t looked at the mouse driver in the source code yet.
Scoth42: I really need to see if I can sort out what’s up with my ST Mouse on an ST before I go trying to get it working on 8-bit. It’ll work fine sometimes, very sometimes, but other times will get stuck only moving up or down when I move the mouse in either direction

GEOS news led to some discssion on GUIs for the 8bits – there are now three. GEOS, GOS (from flashjazzcat) and Diamond GUI.

Ripjetski: Now the race is on! GOS over geos, who will finish first?
flashjazzcat: GEOS has already won, since it’s in a far more functional state than my OS. In fact Diamond won decades ago. But it’s about more than ‘who’s first’. 

Diamond is also available in a CART format, for instant loading on the Atari.

Thom Cherryhomes: Diamond GOS 3.0 does work with NOS. 

Andy Diller (me) finally got netcat working on the Atari with SSH support and was able to login to his local SGI server.

Thom Cherryhomes: since netcat uses the standard editor, it works fine with ace80 and other 80 column extenders — the thing about netcat is that it is dumb
There is zero terminal emulation. It was done to show how to communicate with the network device.

But Diamond tickled something in Thom’s head and so…

Thom Cherryhomes: I do admit looking at the Diamond Utilities and Programming kit that it’s not hard writing diamond apps. he crammed quite an API into that goofy cartridge
@here if anyone wants to write diamond GOS apps. try writing a fujinet one. 
The API is ridiculously simple, uses accumulator to specify function, and a set of parameters in zero page.

Thom Cherryhomes: or am I gonna have to do this to prove the point too?  

Thom Cherryhomes: it’s taking all my energy to make the bindings at the moment
Thom Cherryhomes: halfway through the bindings.
Thom Cherryhomes: will hand this off to the cc65 guys.

A day later the cc65 bindings were complete for Diamond OS…

https://github.com/tschak909/diamond-gos-cc65/

Thom Cherryhomes: ok, binding is up there, will alert the CC65 peeps.

Shawn Jefferson came back in to announce that his cloud Z-machine was ready for testing:

Shawn Jefferson: I pretty much have a workable Z-machine client done now… just need to open my server to the Internet and let some folks try it out. Some games work great, other’s not quite as great due to the very simple text formatting of frotz in Dumb mode. Another set-back, I let some of the magic smoke out of my Fujinet… plugged in USB power so I could boot with a cartridge (ACE 80XL cart) to test, and I guess the USB extension cable or something else caused some issue. My FN still works, but I don’t think I can flash it any longer 

It turns out Shawn may have shorted out the u2 chip on the FN.

mozzwald: U2 is the USB to serial chip  you wont be able to update firmware.

Zmachine client: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14Pq3X9eenDsB3fzja3UOW4HLFICtKwxn?usp=share_link

Shawn Jefferson: Who wants to try the Zmachine client for FN? You can download it here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14Pq3X9eenDsB3fzja3UOW4HLFICtKwxn?usp=share_link
You have to change the server to 172.103.210.56:3000 (hopefully that works, I have it port forwarded)
If you get an error while playing, try to reset your FN (JSON bug). Use “save” and “restore” to save and restore your game, don’t type anything else, things will probably go totally sideways. If you run some sort of 80-column mode, make sure to change your screen width to 80 in the program.
I included a soft 80-column driver on the ATR called “E80”. If you load it first you will be in 80-column mode. For some reason it really affects SIO… load from FN will work, but it’s very slow. Not sure why. ACE80XL cartridge also tested and working fine.

Atari Config Bug Fixes

Schadret (on github: frachel) had done the hard work in porting Atari CONFIG back into the common CONFIG repo, in order to keep parity with all the supported platforms (ADAM and Apple2) continued development with CONFIG. The porting hasn’t been without it share of issues however, and there has been a bug in the Display List for the Atari CONFIG that shows as a tear and roll in the CONFIG’s config screen (yes, CONFIG itself has a config).

Schadret (github: frachel): Yeah, I was trying the idea someone gave me before doing a more drastic fix, but doesn’t seem to have worked. Once that one line gets turned to double-height (16 scanlines) the list becomes too big.. it was suggested to change some lines further down to 1 scanline (value 0) and it might be ok, but Andy tested and it wasn’t. I’ll work on a real fix in the next day or so.. I think I’ll just rearrange the layout of that screen a little – otherwise I think I’ll need a 2nd displaylist array just for that screen, which seems like a waste.

On Nov 25th, with some code fixes from Schadret Mozzwald released a new Atari Firmware that fixed the Display List issues with CONFIG and the issue is gone.

mozzwald: @here can I get some folks to test out the new Atari config program. I want to make sure the display list issues are gone. press C to view the config and make sure there are no display issues. you can flash this firmware with fujinet-flasher from the command line: fujinet-flasher /path/to/firmware.zip

Meanwhile, fenrock has been breaking down the fnConfig code into multiple files targeting each of their functions…

fenrock (github: markjfisher): I’m going to work on the wifi issue on the backlog for having multiple SSID configs in INI file.
I’ve got a local change that splits the monster fnConfig.cpp into 15 separate files each dealing with their own part of the configuration, I’m going to push that first else any other devs making changes to config in the firmware are going to cause me a lot of conflict headaches.
If that’s ok with peeps I’ll go ahead.

fnConfig.cpp is now 10 lines instead of 1600

Andy Diller (me) set down to figure out the DT80 card ROM and using it with CP/M that is available on the FujiNet device (via emulation on the ESP32). I want to use the XEP-80 eventually but for now the DT80 is the only thing setup to provide the right about of columns of text (80) and emulation (ADM-3) for connecting to the CP/M system.

I learned about 4k vs 8k roms (I think 4k were the “right carts” supported only on the original 800). To use the DT80 ROM in my AVG and UNO carts I had to have a 8k rom. Moz had one already, which worked. Some pages talk about conversation tools – but they didn’t work for me.

The DT80 locked up on my NUC, but it did finally work ok in the 1088XEL I also have- which has a sophia for DVI output which renders the font readable on a LCD panel.

AlexS popped over and was asking for help running a TNFS server on his existing MacOSX server. There were a number of challenges waiting for him to open up the service and allow outside access to his Macintosh.

One show stopper was that Apple already has a service listening on the UDP port that TNFS wants to use. Even though AlexS could re-build TNDS to use a new port, without a proxy in place there are no FN clients that would use the different port.

FN Secrets Encryption

fenrock (github: markjfisher): So checkout my fnconfig.ini wifi section:

[WiFi]
enabled=1
SSID=atari4e4
passphrase=AL?>dCEw:uGZ1oWxG
encrypted=1

I’ve gone with (as talked about earlier) a key based on (not equal to) the MAC address of the fujinet.
So if you change MAC you’d have to reset to default, and re connect to your wifi, and reset your hosts/drives, but meh I doubt that’s a thing.
..
It will detect that your wifi passphrase is not encrypted on booting the device, and encrypt/save it back to SD. From that point if it needs to read it again on next boot, it silently decrypts it.

It means that if your SD is lost then your wifi password is encrypted. Low hanging fruit, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

This started a discussion and revealed a number of issues that may hinder this for wider adoption.

Schadret (github: frachel): Keep in mind that fujinet-pc currently gives you a hardcoded MAC address D0:1C:ED:C0:FF:EE so that may need to be changed so the key won’t be the same for everyone using -pc .. ?

WebUI Look Refresh

but fenrock wasn’t done there. This lead him to looking deeper into the FujiNet’s Web interface and the current options and layout inside of this project…

fenrock (github: markjfisher): While I’m playing with the UI interface, I noticed there’s nothing in the Boot Settings. What do people think of this?

fenrock (github: markjfisher): I’ve also changed the CSS to fix the boxes so they fit better. Notice the HRs are now correctly across the entire form instead of mysteriously stopping, and I’ve tweaked a few other things. A couple of things to fix, but getting there:

Just today fenrock checked in his changes and TCH merged them into the core code. They look amazing.

FujiNet and TNFS Timeouts

Scoth42 brought up some issues with TNFS timeouts notices when FujiNet boots. Moz confirmed and noted that these issues also affect ADAM FujiNet boots. The issue revolves around the amount of time spent waiting for a TNFS host to load a slot.

Scoth42: Although something is still borking up the Fujinet unless I’m misunderstanding how it works – it reboots to Ready after it gets cranky, and if I reboot the Atari without rebooting the Fujinet it doesn’t respond at all. Probably not an issue for most users but anyone powering it externally could run into a problem

Thom Cherryhomes: part of the issue is that there are two timeouts, an SIO timeout, and the fujinet retry timeout– since we have timeouts for most network operations set to 0x0F, the firmware should be trying for 15 seconds max.

Scoth42: Also, with no SD card in, it seems what whatever is locking up the fujinet is wiping the config too

mozzwald: I’m gunna play around with the timeout and see if anything gets better

Moz posted a firmware with reduced timeouts and that seems to make things better — Scoth42 also was testing.

Disk Slot Return Issue

Scoth42 noticed another issue from the migration of Atari’s CONFIG from it’s original repo into the common CONFIG:

Scoth42: In the old config, you’d browse through a TNFS server, find a disk image, hit Return on it and pick a drive slot, and then it’d return you to where you were in the TNFS server. In new config it drops you back to the main menu. If you’re mounting something that’s multiple sides/disks/etc it means you have to browse back through the whole TNFS tree again to get back there– and if it’s something like Alternate Reality or the other big games that are multiple disks that can get old real fast

Thom Cherryhomes: if you see in the config code, we have states that we flip between which are the major parts of the program and substates for divisions within those parts of the program and we just set the variables to jump to those parts of the program when needed –the core logic of config is literally built out of switch statements (it’s the finite state machine (FSM) pattern)

Schadret (github: frachel): I tried looking at that early on, couldn’t find a simple way back to the file list, but now that I’m more familiar I’ll look again. After you select a file the state goes to SELECT_SLOT .. and when you pick a slot, SS_DONE is set and select_slot_done() in select_slot.c sets the state to HOSTS_AND_DEVICES. If I set the state there to SELECT_FILE instead you do go back into the TNFS host, but at the root /
[3:09 PM]Schadret (github: frachel): because that path goes through the SF_INIT code with no way around it currently. I’m a little more leery touching the “common”/”framework” code since I can’t test on other systems.

mozzwald: I messed with this a little bit and kinda sorta got it to work. I added a new sf_substate called SF_BACKTO which I set in addition to setting SELECT_FILE. Then in select_file() I changed to this:

  if (sf_subState==SF_BACKTO)
    sf_subState = SF_DISPLAY;
  else
    sf_subState = SF_INIT;

mozzwald: This gets you back to the same dir, but your selected file becomes the top of the list. if you selected something in the middle of the page, you cannot hit prev to go back/see what’s higher in the list

Schadret (github: frachel): I’ll mess around with your idea. Wondering if pos is getting reset somewhere.

Mozwald released a firmware with his fix and added a new branch to track this work.

Commodore

Mozwald has finished his first round of C64 FujiNet hardware and cases to protect them while fitting to the C64 contours.

As with many first tries there are still some issues to sort on the hardware design. What is different here is that Mozzwald has a capable partner in hardware design, Jamie (idolpx) the creator of Meatloaf and the lead in merging of Meatloaf functionality into the FujiNet project.

First hardware issue was around the I2C GPIO expander and getting it to work.

idolpx: oh… yes.. the interrupt is firing.
mozzwald: so, the chip is “working” but we can’t talk to it?
idolpx: so it has to be something with the I2C address. Don’t you think?
mozzwald: did you try at lower speed?
idolpx: yep
mozzwald: hm
mozzwald: is there some simple arduino i2c bus scan sketch?

Lots of back and forth testing and hacking between Jamie and Mozz.

idolpx: Also I think the interrupt for IEC is getting cleared when the interrupt is being set for the User Port and that’s why IEC stops working.

idolpx: I believe this will do it!
idolpx: just pushed if you want to try this out.
mozzwald: 
]idolpx: try that.
idolpx: I have to clean and optimize some stuff but it is working.
mozzwald: yeah! working now 

On to the next issue: RESET

mozzwald: I’ve been trying to figure out the constant RESET when fujiloaf isn’t connected to the c64. because the RESET line is floating it seems to jump above the high level and back down triggering the reset. one of the 2 I have does it constantly, the other does not but I can make it happen by touching the IEC port

But mozzwald soon determined that no cutting was required:

mozzwald: @idolpx before you go chopping up your fujiloaf, I changed this in parallel.cpp to input and it seems to be working with the line hooked up expander.pinMode( ATN, GPIOX_MODE_OUTPUT );
mozzwald: ATN should be an input always as I understand it
Thom Cherryhomes: that is correct
Thom Cherryhomes: you can’t use it as an output.
mozzwald: so, probably no need to go cutting the board anymore 

Work continues to iron out any more issues on the prototype boards.

rc2014

jskists continued with his one man show to get FujiNet on the little rc2014. These past few weeks he brought up the SD card and then ported netcat over and was able to use the rc2014 and the prototype FujiNet to access the Level 29 BBS.

jskists: And yes. adding a pull-up resistor network to my breadboard, for the SD breakout, did the trick — the error message had turned into timeout error! With a closer look, I noticed that I had the wire for MOSI at the wrong pin!
jskists: And yes, the SD card is now mounted!

jskists: Porting the “netcat” to RC2014’s CP/M using the network protocols. Finally got reading “function” working. Now for the “write” function…

Other Platforms

TalkieToaster obtained a Raspberry Pi interface for the BBC Micro and is investigating running FujiNet-PC on the RiPi, to then use as a FujiNet device for the BBC Micro.

TalkieToaster: Bit of a nightmare getting the damn thing to fit under the keyboard through, had to take the mainboard out. However, it’s so damn fast running BeebSCSI that I pretty much don’t want to go back to using the Retroclinics Datacenter board I have installed for flash card hard drive access.
TalkieToaster: The firmware runs from a Fat32 Boot image on the Pi instead of a full Linux installation like Raspberry Pi OS.

ZX-Spectrum

thweasel and That Old Nerd continued on yet more troubleshooting work to nail down the FujiNet Bus. Issues around bus noise and using buffers for the signals to the spectrum to help fix that.

thweasel: : Stumped… If I fix the data value in code it works, if I use a variable it breaks.
Data writes to ram fine, the read if I use a variable just goes crazy
Starting to suspect the simulator might be causing the problem somehow?!
I think … ESP32 Libraries let you put an slight offset in when the SPI data is sampled. With the Arduino Library there is no offset option, so you get a clash on the clock moving the ShiftReg before sampling, you miss a bit or get a weird edge reading. And I suspect it is making the Simulator twitch… In short; going to try the Shiftin routines… SPI can be an ESP thing later

seatsafetyswitch: I appreciate you looking into it. We’ll get a handle on this eventually, it’s just a matter of time

thweasel: I’ve seen several tutorials/explanations/guides, no one seems to have a “good” pattern for running shift registers with SPI. Its like it one of those things that people thinks is easy, so needs no explanation because they got it working so everyone can! its a faff

TON has some breakthrus:

That Old Nerd: I think I finally figured out the issue with my circuit. I believe that the HC245s are switching too slow. To get any type of usable output I had to bypass the OE pin on the 245 and use the IORQ to directly drive the CE on the ROM. We should still be able to use the 245s for isolation when we need the ESP to control the board, but from my testing using IORQ to drive the 245 is problematic. BTW the image is of an LPRINT on repeat with the HC245s bypassed.

thweasel: Trace looks like an IO call pushing 0xFF 3 times on the databus.

Their work continues…

Wrap Up

This was another surprising amount of updates for a period I’d imagined would be much more quiet. Apple firmware support is really firming up with DISKII, printer, clock and timing fixes all being added. Atari had a number of new avenues opened up (Diamond GUI Programming for just one) and some solid fixes also in timing, CONFIG and the web ui. Commodore is top of mind for Jamie and Mad Mozzy and it won’t be long before a prototype 2 CBM board. At some point the Spectrum is going to pop in and there may be a board for the RC-2014 before any of them!

Welcome back again to another TWIF – This Week in FujiNet. This is a catch-up edition covering a whopping 4 weeks of FujiNet progress across most of October and the start of November 2022. The weather was warm on the east coast all October and even into November, with some balmy days — but as I write this it’s settled into a more colder clime with 40 and 50 degree days making it finally feel like the start of an east-coast fall. With the chiller weather and darkened evenings comes more reasons to stay indoors and use your FujiNet.

The Atari platform has some major developments as some interesting projects that utilize the power of the FujiNet pick up steam and mature. Two of those projects are so interesting that I’ve broken them out into independent postings that you’ll find on this blog, with mentions below about them.

This edition of This Week In FujiNet covers these dates in 2022:

• 42 – Oct 16 – 22n
• 43 – Oct 23 – 29th
• 44 – Oct 30 – Nov 4th
• 45 -Nov 6 – 11th

Quick Hits

There is a new platform! The rc2014 is a Z80 homebrew system that now boots Fujinet and has a working CONFIG thanks to @jskists and his work. More info below in the rc2014 section.

The C64 FujiNet is real- @mozzwald completed an initial design and had some testing boards made. It boots FujiNet- no more need to use an Apple FujiNet board. More info in the Commodore section below.

Update: The Vintage Computer Center is closing its doors by the end of this year! See the link below and grab some FujiNets while they are available (they are also available from other vendors, but VCC was a huge supplier of excellent boards to many many people! I’m very sad to see the VCC close up shop.

Housekeeping

Where to purchase a device:

• FujiNet Official Site
• Buy A FN Device from Vintage Computer Center
• Buy A FN Device from Arcade Shopper
• Purchase a FujiNet device from TBA – The Brewing Academy
• Antonio @masteries on AA Sells FujiNets from Spain – now Apple2, Atari & ADAM

You can find more information about the FujiNet project

• GH Project Wiki Pages for Devices Hacking & Coding
• Join our Discord and learn and contribute
• The FujiNet Facebook Group has interesting discussions

Check Mr. Robot’s Live Fujinet Server Status – where to connect with your FN

FujiNet Flasher – keep your FN up2date for best results.

Videos

FujiNet Videos

• LinguaXE v0.1 – translator for Atari XL/XE – Amazing demo of FujiNet access remote web services to provide real-time text translations on your Atari, with Amazing D/L graphics and unicode.
• First prototype test of #FujiNet / Meatloaf for #Commodore64 – Mozzwald shows a peek of the very first ever prototype board build for the Commodore 64 FujiNet board. Now with LED support.
• First Look: compact FujiNet from Europe! – Javier Rivera @javmaster takes us thru a hands on demo of the AppleII FujiNet board available today from Masteries in Spain (see above).
• Fujinet Exhibit at Kennett Classic – Eric Rangell demos two FujiNets at the recent Kennett Classic Retro Computer Show (In PA).
• Visit FujiNet CP/M with Altirra – apc takes us thru using Altirra with a real FujiNet.

Interesting Videos

• 1985: Making TEXT ADVENTURE Games | Micro Live | Retro Gaming | BBC Archive – 8 min. of cool Infocom tech from 1985.
• The RS-232 protocol – Ben Eater adds RS232 to his 6502 board computer and explains how RS232 works along the way.

Platforms

ADAM

@dotmatrix, @seatsafetyswitch, @HenryR and @Ron Klein worked on ADAM testing and getting some new ADAM systems up and working. The difference between the ADAM System and the ADAM Expansion was explored.

AppleII

@erangell popped in and was asking about apple2, TNFS and MIDI. He has a video of his demo at Kennett Classic above in the video section.

erangell: OK Thanks. I will demo serving Atari and Apple disk images from TNFS on a Raspberry PI on November 5 at kennettclassic.com: https://www.kennettclassic.com/calendar-2022/

@robj has been building a number of small test harness apps that work the SmartPort routines in the FujiNet code – pushing them to copy and write test files across the different SP interfaces (IIGS,IIC,YellowStone, etc…) to iron out all the edge cases in the FujiNet Apple implementation. He recently enhanced it to support the largest disk ‘image’ that the SP can support:

robj: I had a bit of a play supporting the full 24bit block numbers in the test util. That’s a big disk image that SP supports! Seems the IIgs will can support up to 2Gb images using the hfs file system. It can’t boot off them, but can use them as secondary storage image. I’m running out of room with the 40 column display, so trimmed/rearranged the output screen.

These apps are used by a number of testers to QA the releases by JeffP as he works to re-factor some of the SP code in the project to better support the planned DISKII enhancements coming after SmartPort.

Jeff Piepmeier: I’m (slowly) consolidating the packet handling routines. My goal is to have a single function the devices call to send a packet. It will take in the necessary arguments for the different uses.
Jeff Piepmeier: Then I will move all the 7+1 GCR code out of the devices into the low level lib.
Thom Cherryhomes: excellent

More re-factoring by Jeff:

Jeff Piepmeier: The devices no longer need to deal with smartport/iwm low-level details (except for decoding the command packet – i will look into that next). The bus class does the calls to the low-level class. It’s looking like it’ll be easier to create a low-level slot interface class and slip it in without having to rewrite the bus and devices. I think we can just send smartport packets (no GCR coding needed) back and forth, using 4-phase handshaking. At least that’s a hope.

Many rounds of testing by Ron Klein, running the SP Test Utility from robj.

JeffP encountered the ESP32’s ability to easily multi-task!

Jeff Piepmeier: @Thom Cherryhomes for some silly reason I had never tried messing with the web interface. I can navigate TNFS servers while the SP TEST is running!
…
Jeff Piepmeier: i’m just blown away by this … i mounted a disk in slot 3 using the browser and the SPTEST is just banging away at the image in slot 2. no sweat.

By Nov 7th Jeff was done and had merged his re-factor back into master for the project…

Jeff Piepmeier: @hereI merged the refactoring branches into master with this comment “Moved all SmartPort low-level code out of devices mostly into iwm_ll.cpp with accesses done by the iwmBus class. Decode the command packet so devices can access decoded parameters. Both changes should ease creating a slot based interface.”

More testing is going on now. So far no major blockers.

Atari8

There is a lot going on in the Atari Space! I’ve broken out some items into their own postings to better explain and track them. I’ll mention them briefly in the platform review but here are the links to read them:

NOS – The Networking Operating System
AHSS – Atari High Score System – share your high scores

High Scores

So Thomas Cherryhomes (TCH) posted in Atari Age on October 9th: “Storing game high scores for legacy games on TNFS servers.”

Had a thought, bytes 11-14 on the ATR file format are not used.
use bytes 11 and 12 to specify a single sector which can be marked as read-write, despite the mounted mode of the disk image.
The purpose is to mark a sector that can store high scores on public TNFS servers.
If sector is accessed, cache is always flushed, and WRITEs to this sector cause a temporary re-open as read-write using a secondary file descriptor, which is then immediately closed.

What has ensued from that idea has been one of the most fun and easy (for the end-user) developments in recent Atari history. @TCH has combined one neat trick, the power of the FujiNet device, and some really hard work patching games to come up with a system that allows anyone with a FujiNet to download a patched game, play it, and if you are good enough persist your own High Score back up to the source disk for anyone else to immediately see as they boot the same game… and so on and so on. I’m calling this AHSS – Atari High Scoring System.

More on the AHSS at my blog post for it. For now I’ll just review what happened in Discord…

@DjayBee helped with patching some games for AHSS..

NOS was updated (by @DaBaBa) with a feature to support auto executing a batch file upon boot. This was an important update, and this is discussed in more details in my NOS blog post!

Thom Cherryhomes: @Michael Sternberg somebody came by and added autoexec.bat support to NOS.
…
Michael Sternberg: I finally reviewed it yesterday. Very, very clever. I knew there was a need for autoexec but I didn’t have any good ideas on how it could be implemented.
Thom Cherryhomes: yup
Thom Cherryhomes: I’m thinking through in my head how digging into disk images could be implemented…
Thom Cherryhomes: am exploring the possibility of using a channel mode to do so (like is done with JSON and XML currently)
Thom Cherryhomes: or via #.

TCH continued to add more games to AHSS… Tuttifrutti, Wizard of Wor, GORF, Lode Runner, Flak, and others. Big support from @DjayBee as they tore thru a decent amount of games in the past month.

There was some discussion with @mozzwald, @Schadret (github: frachel) referencing an AA thread about TNFS links, and about having a hard-coded or pre-defined HOST slot in CONFIG that would point to a highly-available TNFS server that would know about all currently live TNFS servers for some sort of auto-discovery for users. While an interesting idea – it may be pursued in the future no-one has current plans on implementing it yet. AA1 and AA2

Andy Diller (me) started a conversation about why FujiNet PC can’t just get ‘new versions’ of the FujiNet firmware – I was asking as the High Score games required a new Firmware build to recognize the ATR header changes, but FujiNet PC (FNPC) didn’t have those new features till @apc (the creator and genius behind FNCP) merged in the new changes from the FujiNet PlatformIO into FNPC and created a new release.

It boiled down to my mistaken assumption that FNPC was an emulation of the FujiNet on the PC – and so therefore could just consume a new firmware file as part of its emulation. But it’s not an emulation it’s a port of all the ESP32 calls into a POSIX compatible application that just makes FujiNet itself into an application.

andy diller: ok but even porting the c code- wouldn’t you need something like RTOS on the other end to deal with it? or you bypassed PIO all together and did like the ‘raw Fujinet code’?

apc: found many RTOS calls similar to POSIX, it was more difficult to make windows port vs linux and mac

On the amazing origin of FujiNet-PC:

apc: the whole FN-PC is a challenge for me, was not coding in C/C++ for decades, then on AA Thom said “it is doable”

Which may be the biggest understatement of 2022 in my opinion.

Thom has another idea

Thom Cherryhomes: I’m instigating a thing over on ABBUC. They have their pd-Collection up on FujiNet, and a corresponding PDF file generated from a database. Am asking them for a dump of the db to do a proof of concept to make a simple front-end to it. https://abbuc.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1050

Abbuc is planning to figure something out to allow searches from the Atari. Meanwhile @tch also designed some logos for the group.

@hideehoo popped in to announce he has a new case for this “thru-hole” version of the FujiNet board. His designs are available on GitHub, both the FujiNet device and now the case for it.

PacMan
@TCH ended up having to create a High Score system from scratch for PacMac, but since the source is available he hacked out a new version (with a lot of work) that not only supported the AHSS but he even fixed the color of Inky.

Thom Cherryhomes: @here modified PAC-MAN player color palette, because INKY is supposed to be BLUE damn it!

With Pacman up I was able to scramble and get my own initials up on the AHSS! I post an image of the web-based leader board system here for posterity:

NOS and Binary Loads

Michael Sternberg: The issue with the binary loader had to do with interpreting an EOF. To mitigate, I added a call to status while reading the payload header. So if the EOF wasn’t correctly detected, it would hit the EOF while trying to read the next (non-existing) header.
However the binary loader doesn’t rely on the handler code. When the loader is solved, it will be moved into the handler and NOS will perform a binary load via CIO.

@mnemo continues his work on preserving Atari disks, since he has a flux reader now (Greaseweazle) for atari drives and can image more disks. @DjayBee offered support to get a8rawconv working on some floppies.

mnemo: LOTS of errors from a8rawconv
DjayBee: 0-40 is OK. It only tries to read one more track to the inside. According to ijor you sometimes find interesting data from disk mastering.
Connect the XF to an Atari and format a disk on it. Then try to dump this disk using the GW.

FBASIC
On October 30th @TCH posted that he was porting some FujiNet commands from the ADAM work back into the Atari.. and he also mentioned FBASIC…

Thom Cherryhomes: is porting the Adam fmount to Atari, as it is a better program.
Thom Cherryhomes: There is a ready to run version of dmsc’s excellent FastBASIC 4.4 in the @ABBUC Public Domain library, complete with manual and example programs. This is a great way to quickly write programs that take full advantage of the atari8bit, and with the #FujiNet, you can quickly access it using the abbuc.social TNFS! Try it today!

Just within the day @tch had the idea to bring some FujiNet commands directly into FBASIC- and posted as much on an AA thread with the author of FBASIC @dmsc.

Thom Cherryhomes: fastbasic is a good idea to add direct fujinet support for, as it has tons of useful features, is very fast, and compiles down to small code.
[8:54 PM]Thom Cherryhomes: some of the things i’ve seen with it, with regards to the 10L BASIC contest, are mind blowing.

@tch began his work to implement FujiNet commands into FBASIC but his some roadblocks. After some postings on AA the author of FBASIC came over on Nov. 5th to the Discord to help!

dmsc: Hi!
dmsc: I’m ready to answer questions about the FastBasic parser

And they dove right in.

dmsc: FastBasic VM is stack based, with one 16 bit acumulator (stored at AX) and one 16 bit address register (stored at SADDR). So, POKE A, B is translated to “LOAD A; more to SADDR; LOAD B; store into SADDR location.
Thom Cherryhomes: also, I saw a string expression token somewhere….can I use that?
dmsc: yes
Thom Cherryhomes: ok, gonna pull and rebuild
dmsc: You have “STR_EXPR”: expects a string, can be a constant or variable
Thom Cherryhomes: that’s what I thought I saw.
dmsc: only problem with that, it is not expected to be written to – it would be up to the user to guarantee that the string is initialized.
dmsc: for example, if you pass a constant string “x”, the compiler will pass you the address of that constant inside the code.
Thom Cherryhomes: well it would be used e.g. for the argument for nopen.
dmsc: as you would only read from it, it is ok.
Thom Cherryhomes: ok cool
Thom Cherryhomes: gonna try again to do nopen in the order I want it.
dmsc: For a first version would be ok, but a next version could include proper asm code to handle it better. Currently FastBasic has a routine get_str_eol that copies a string to LBUFF and adds a $9B to the end.
Thom Cherryhomes: gotcha.

@tch’s initial list of commands to implement:

Thom Cherryhomes: ok, will implement the rest of the commands, what I basically think should happen:
* nopen
* nclose
* nget
* nput
* nstatus
* sio for everything else

@tch hit this one hard and by Nov 6th there was a PR for @dmsc to incorporate his work into FBASIC. He later posted a complete sample Mastodon client in FBASIC using FujiNet.

Thom Cherryhomes: finishes up a mastodon example client in fastbasic

SSH Protocol Adapter
Out of nowhere Mark J Fisher (@fenrock) comes and ports over libssh to use on the ESP32. Now you can ssh on your Atari to most any modern system using SSH. He appeared on the discord and patiently went thru the dev onboarding experience with Platform IO and worked out getting a dev system on his end. And we found out soon enough what he was doing with it as on November 3rd he announced:

fenrock: I’ve ported libssh to fujinet, just looking to test it.
By porting I mean I’ve hacked the living fuck out of libssh from https://github.com/tnn2/esp-idf-libssh and amend SSH.cpp/h to use it.
How do I load netcat into my spartados session? I’ve got the amended SDX that has the N/R utils loaded, but it doesn’t have “nc”, so is there an atr I can mount that includes it?

And just like that FujiNet has another protocol adapter! And this is a big one. SSH from your Atari to any modern system that supports ssh.

TNFS updates
TNFS (trivial networking file system) has been the backbone of the FujiNet project allowing remote systems to easily host the files that the FujiNet needs to mount disk images for all the platforms. The TNFS service was originally written as part of the Spectranet project, to bring networking to the Spectrum computers. Apparently the author (Dylan Smith) has caught wind of this project and it’s growing popularity as he send this message to @tch:

Hi
Given that tnfsd is being used in much more than the Spectranet these days, I’m planning some time soon to move it to its own github repository. I also recently got an Atari 800 XL and a FujiNet, really nice device.

Atari CONFIG now back common CONFIG repo
As FujiNet was first an Atari only project, the FN Atari CONFIG (the program that auto loads when turning on the Atari and lets you configure the FN device) was the first and only CONFIG created. CONFIG is used in lieu of a screen on the FN device itself. This saves money and complexity and lets you use the Atari screen you already have.

After the ADAM port, CONFIG was abstracted out into its own Repo. The Apple CONFIG was derived here. So the “common” CONFIG and Atari config started to diverge in the feature set.

A project was lead by @Schadret (github: frachel) to bring the Atari CONFIG back in with the newer CONFIGS for the other platforms so there was a common base functionality with features that all the platforms could benefit from. That is complete, and the current Firmware release for Atari is the first to have the Atari CONFIG built from the common repo.

@mozzwald posted a new Firmware update that included the new ssh protocol adapter and the new CONFIG for Atari.
There was a bug in this for Atari that didn’t allow passwords for wifi longer than 31 chars, and the new High Scores weren’t saving properly. This was fixed and a new firmware release was quickly pushed out.

Andy Diller (me) began a conversation/help request with the author of NOS @Michael Sternberg as I started to actually boot up NOS and try to use it effectively. It’s a fascinating project with some really cool features already. I have created its own post for NOS to please see that for more details.
One thing that came up is the issue of capitalization, the Atari and NOS. Caps matter at this point and often on the underlying file-systems (in my case, my TNFS server running on Linux was hosting my NOS “file hierarchy” and it has lower cases for directories. So for NOS you must respect the capitalization as you traverse directories, but all the commands themselves are capitalized. It is possible to create a filesystem on Linux that ignores case, which should then treat something like BIN same as bin. More testing is needed to see how that would work.

Commodore 64

Big news- @mozzwald has the first FujiNet hardware for the C64 built and working!

mozzwald: plugs into userport. powered by userport 9VAC or USB-C 5V. DAC output to 3.5mm jack. buffered IEC pins. userport parallel through i2c gpio expander. ws2812 LED strip on the front
mozzwald: can be built for vertical (shown) or horizontal

See his video at the top in the video sections.

He has even designed a new PSU adapter for the C64:

It takes in 9V ac via barrel connectors (like the Atari 9vac bricks) and then USB-C for the 5v. Hopefully some are build and become available on the website for purchase.

Meanwhile Ron Klein has been playing with FujiNet and the C128 and can report back that it works on that system in C64 emulation mode.

Ron was working with @idolpx to setup and test Meatloaf/FujiNet and helped replicate some of the PHP scripts on his own server to serve up some ML games and programs for the C64.

idolpx: When you “Send to Meatloaf” does it show the right URL queued up?
idolpx: OH!!! I think I was testing relaying so that you could use ftp:// urls too.
idolpx: That would explain it. The server can’t proxy for your localnet stuff. I will check and turn that off if it is on.
idolpx: It should just relay the URL to you so that Meatloaf can then go get it directly.
idolpx: Yep.. that was it. Try now!
idolpx: It’s expecting to see “//196.168.” or “//10.” in the url to redirect it instead of proxy.

FujiNet-PC

@apc announced new releases of FNPC to incorporate new features including the High Score system!

apc: New releases:

FujiNet-PC 2210.1

Changes:

Following FujiNet main project:
Support for High Score Enabled Games on Atari
Improved directory navigation for N: (CD in NOS)
Improved JSON parsing
Host slot in CONFIG can point to FTP server (read-only, no writes)
E.g host slot can be ftp://ftp.pigwa.net
Fixed [C]opy file in CONFIG program from / to TNFS server

Project: https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-pc

Downloads: https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-pc/releases/tag/release-2210.1

FujiNet-PC Launcher 2210.1

Bundle with Launcher and updated FujiNet-PC

Project: https://github.com/a8jan/fujinet-pc-launcher

Downloads: https://github.com/a8jan/fujinet-pc-launcher/releases/tag/release-2210.1

rc2014

On Nov 6th in the morning (+5 GMT) jskists popped in and announced his breadboard FujiNet was booting.

[10:42 AM]jskists: Woohoo! FujiNet-RC2014 is alive-ish!!!!!

After a couple more days he showed a working CONFIG that was connecting to his wifi…

jskists: So, it turns out that my comms issue was me getting UART1 and UART2 mixed up!
jskists: I think that’s “board bring-up” milestone success!

jskists: Also, getting RTS and CTS the right way around also helps with the flow control….
jskists: Next steps: start re-enabling the commands and actually connect to my wifi…
jskists: That shall be the weekend’s task.

Next development of a FujiNet board for the rc2014 can proceed, and Mozzwald has offered to help create it.

jskists: And don’t worry, @mozzwald , once I’m settled on a basic schematic, I’ll be hoping that you’d be able to do your magic and turn it into a PCB.
mozzwald: yeah, I can probably whip something up!

ZX-Spectrum

A whole bunch more work happened here in the past month.

Almost too much to cover except that @That Old Nerd and @thweasel have been cranking out ideas, plans, schematics and code to make FujiNet on a Bus (FNOAB) that much closer to reality. And it seems to be getting very, very close.

thweasel: *grey boxes are not part of the Fuji board, they are supporting components for the simulation
[5:46 PM]That Old Nerd: I will check it in the morning, before I start on the breadboard. So taking a shot in the dark, you didn’t get anything written on your paper today.
thweasel: I did a bit here and there, I am in a bit of a rut. Sometimes do the writing as the bit on the side while being productive else where can help. Sometimes I just get tied into making things look neat for hours
thweasel: Are you breadboarding the ROM/IOd section?

thweasel: Mostly code work last few day. Slow and tedious, basically making methods for each type of operation and the small steps involved. Lots of duplication in the code and refactoring going on, but it’s a process that is helping to flush out the details for the circuit.

Then @TON posted this interesting picture:

That Old Nerd: Well I got some work done yesterday and today. I burned the ROM with the new numbering scheme. It boots, I will hopefully start testing the base decoding tomorrow or Tuesday.

That is the first time I’ve seen a real ZX connected to the buss! Amazing progress on, in my opinion, the hardest and most important platform bring up in FujiNet history.

Wrapup

Sorry for the delay in getting these notes assembled, I’m trying to balance the amount of interesting new work and advances in FujiNet with the amount of time between updates. Then all of a sudden you turn around and there is an onslaught of new and cool things going on. This should be a good break-down of all the major events happening here on FujiNet and if this interests you enough, and you’ve read all the way down here to the bottom, you really should consider jumping into the Discord yourself and say hello, start playing with something, and asking some questions.