Programming with the TIPI

[+9640News]

Matt,

 

I have a few questions with respect to the TIPI on the TI-99/4A.

 

I am trying to understand the differences one must accommodate between the TIPI and something like a RS232 based WiModem232.

 

If a router redirects a specific port to the TIPI, will it auto connect and establish a connection for an inbound connection? If not, is it possible some kind of command could be executed from within the DSR that flags a Connection as being present/not present on a specific port?

 

In the RS232 world, one can look for a CD Carrier Detect to know when someone has connected with the modem. Is there a method one can use to know when a Telnet port has been opened on the TIPI. If there is not, then would a programming solution be to stay in a loop outputting "Press Enter to Continue" waiting for an Enter keypress from the inbound connection? Or, would the connecting system get a buffer dump of repeated "Press Enter to Continue" messages that had accumulated from hours/days of being in that loop when a connection was established?

 

Is there a command one can use from Extended Basic to allow one to retrieve a single character from the Telnet port? Thinking here along the lines of BBS's written in Extended Basic that are single character based to know if any of them may be modified for use.

 

If an Extended Basic program is listening to a specific port for Telnet, if a second inbound connection comes in, does a connection issue become a problem? I ask this because my Windows BBS listens on one inbound port, and it can sustain 20 separate simultaneous logins. I know somewhere there is some IP address subnet (?) mapping going on, but do not know how the TIPI would respond.

 

Anyways, just doing some thinking here on what can be done in the BBS word with TIPI as a host BBS server.

 

Beery

 

[+jedimatt42]

Nope. Not as designed...

 

The socket system for TIPI only supports outgoing origination.

 

That's all part of the extensibility later though. So adding server sockets is just a matter of python.

 

I could see you designing a system where the TI can ask for if there is an open incoming socket returning the socket number, and stashing that socket into the map of open sockets for the regular socket API. Then just start reading, writing and close with that...

 

-M@

[+9640News]

Nope. Not as designed...

 

The socket system for TIPI only supports outgoing origination.

 

That's all part of the extensibility later though. So adding server sockets is just a matter of python.

 

I could see you designing a system where the TI can ask for if there is an open incoming socket returning the socket number, and stashing that socket into the map of open sockets for the regular socket API. Then just start reading, writing and close with that...

 

-M@

 

I know you have a lot on your plate. Maybe you can put something like that on your wish list for the future. Focus on the PEB version release for now <grin>.

 

Besides a BBS program making use of those features, I could see someone running a program that periodically polled for an incoming connection for chatting, or any other potential set of capabilities.

 

I think the capabilities are endless but only limited by the few programmers that could pull something off.

 

Beery