Contiki on Apple IIe without Uthernet card

Question

Can I run Contiki on my Apple IIe without an Uthernet card? For example, I was thinking that I could run my Raspberry Pi to emulate a network card through the serial port as a null modem. Any examples of people doing this sort of thing would be appreciated.

(Yes, I know about A2Cloud but that doesn't put the TCP/IP stack on A2, it just makes the A2 basically a dumb terminal which isn't so interesting to me.)

Update: Looks like someone did the same basic thing on an Amiga, but not with Contiki.

Answer 1

I reached out to Oliver Schmidt, maintainer of Contiki for Apple 2 (among other things), and he suggested the following:

You can't "emulate" an Uthernet card with an RPi but you can - generally - use the RPi to get online with Contiki.

* Warning *

I haven't tried what I describe below myself. And I have a report that it doesn't work reliably. And it's quite some effort. Nevertheless...

Instead of using an Ethernet card Contiki can be built to use a SuperSerialCard to connect to a SLIP server. There's no pre-built Contiki for SLIP, you have to build it yourself.

Read https://github.com/contiki-os/contiki/blob/master/cpu/6502/README.md, especially

"The cpu/6502/ directory is used for targeting 6502-based machines using the cc65 compiler http://cc65.github.io/cc65/."

and

WITH_SLIP Default: 0 Purpose: Use SLIP (based on RS232 driver coming
with cc65) instead of Ethernet.

additionally read https://github.com/contiki-os/contiki/blob/master/platform/apple2enh/README.md, especially

"The 'disk' make goal requires AppleCommander 1.3.5 or later. It is available at http://applecommander.sourceforge.net/."

You can either build the individual Contiki programs using e.e.g https://github.com/contiki-os/contiki/blob/master/examples/webbrowser-80col/Makefile or build them all using https://github.com/contiki-os/contiki/blob/master/tools/6502/Makefile

Getting the RPi ready is supposed to be easy, e.g. https://harizanov.com/2013/03/tcpip-over-rfm12b-and-raspberry-pi-as-gateway/ says that something like

sudo modprobe slip  
sudo slattach -L -s 38400 -p slip /dev/ttyAMA0 
sudo ifconfig sl0 192.168.5.1 dstaddr 192.168.5.2

is enough.

Please note that I don't know more about this then what I wrote above.

Good luck. Oliver

I will update this with my progress doing so, and try to post the rebuilt Contiki binaries somewhere as well. Thanks to Oliver for his assistance.

Update: I was having trouble with the compilation, so Oliver was kind enough to compile for me and send along. Here are the compiled binaries if you are interested.