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Old 08-21-2010, 02:27 PM
Oliver Schmidt
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Default Contiki 2.4 binary release for Retrocomputing

Hi,

I just released the 'Contiki 2.4 binary release for Retrocomputing'.
It is available at

http://cbm8bit.com/contiki/

and at

http://a2retrosystems.com/contiki.html

This release was built using cc65 2.13.2 from (modified) Contiki 2.4
sources. The orginal sources are available at


http://sourceforge.net/projects/cont...4.zip/download

and the modifications at

http://cbm8bit.com/contiki/contiki-2.4-addon.zip

Contiki 1.x integrated all programs into a common GUI as windows. Very
cool but very complex to to write programs for. In fact there was
never a Contiki 1.x GUI program which was not developed by the Contiki
core team - and as the Contiki core team doesn't develop GUI programs
anymore Contiki 1.x was sort of a deadend street.

So in order to ease development of 3rd-party Contiki program I
modified Contiki 2.x to focus on individual standalone programs with a
fullscreen GUI. This simplification significantly reduced the memory
consumption thus allowing to replace custom "hacks" with generic cc65
components:
- C-library startup code
- Linker config file
- CONIO library
- Mouse driver

As a result Contiki 2.x contains only very little assembler coding and
even less target-specific assembler coding. This allowed for easy
porting to targets beside the C64 namely the C128 and Apple II.
Porting to other cc65 targets wasn't done due to missing Ethernet
hardware.

Contiki 2.4 is the first 2.x release to contain the following
programs:
- dhcp client
- web server
- web browser
- wget
- smtp client
- irc client
- Twitter client

The Twitter client called BREADBOX64 proves that the Contiki 2.x
approach was actual successful as it was independently developed by
the 3rd-party developer Johan Van den Brande.

BTW: In case you want to run Contiki 2.4 on a real Apple II you might
be interested in that fact that there's a new run of Uthernet cards
available right now :-)

Regards,
Oliver
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