Since I've not written an update in a while for those who don't follow the blog on the Spectranet wiki, I hit an important milestone on Saturday.
The most recent thing I've been working on is a simple network filesystem, suitable for 8 bit systems - something that's a bit better than FTP for this kind of use, but not something way over the top such as an RPC-based protocol like NFS or SMB (i.e. the normal UNIX and Windows methods of doing a network filesystem). The filesystem is called TNFS for Tiny Network Filesystem, or perhaps Trivial Network Filesystem. It is a simple UDP protocol that avoids being resource intensive. So far I've written a simple proof-of-concept fileserver in Perl that runs on a modern computer, and a prototype library and client for the Spectrum end.
This weekend, I saved the first ZX BASIC program over ethernet to the fileserver from the Spectrum. Last week, I loaded the first ZX BASIC program into the Spectrum.
The Spectrum TNFS client by default uses the TAP format for files (a file for a Spectrum must contain metadata - such as start address, type of file etc.) I chose the TAP format because it's a simple, well-known format, and it instantly means you can save a program on a real Spectrum, and load it into an emulator, or vice versa; Fuse at least directly supports TAP files for saving and loading, and I suspect most emulators can do the same. The Spectrum TNFS client can also load "raw" files, i.e. just bytes, with no metadata - so you can use a cross assembler on a PC to write a program, and simply load the assembler's output on a real Speccy into the proper location in RAM.
Going the other way, it would also be possible to write a FUSE (no, not the Spectrum emulator, but File system in User Space) driver so that a Mac or Linux/BSD PC* can mount a Spectrum's disc drive over the network
The importance of this milestone is not really any technical giant leap, but it is an important step on the road for the Spectranet to be a piece of useful hardware for every Speccy user.
