Date   : Mon, 27 Dec 2004 14:35:34 +0000
From   : Rob <robert@...>
Subject: Emulated Beebs, Econet and suchlike

<delurk>

Hi All..

Having no room whatsoever on my desk to squeeze in my BBC micro collection, 
I've been trying for some time to find an emulator that I can use 
instead.  The tricky bit is that the main pieces of software I want to run 
are multi-user econet based things, and I've not yet come across an 
emulator that supports econet.

(Specifically, I'd like to get my old BBS software up and running again, 
and so need to run a fileserver with HDD, and at least three stations.  I 
have all my original hardware, but no room to set it up!)

Now, having done some digging have I discovered "AUN" - the Acorn "Econet 
over Ethernet" protocol.  It appears that this is an official protocol to 
run econet over ethernet for the risc machines.

It would seem that using AUN as the transport for an emulated econet 
interface would allow the emulated machine to actually communicate with 
real machines, should one have one, which would be totally freaky (and no 
doubt simplify file transfer issues too!)

There is also some support in Linux for AUN, which means that there is some 
source code available to look at.   (I don't run Linux though. I do have 
several machines on FreeBSD, although no GUIs, and the linux drivers 
suggest they were originally written for FreeBSD, but there is no mention 
in there any more.)

I looked at adding econet support to one of the emulatord myself, but as at 
present I can't seem to conjure up an environment where I can actually 
compile any of those that let one download the source, and my C skills are 
definitely in the "could do with some work" department, I was wondering if 
anybody knows if there has been any work done in this direction already?

[and once I get all that done, I'll have to look into accepting telnet 
connections on the RS423 port!]

Merry Christmas!

Rob O'Donnell