Network tools for the Apple II

Using the same serial/network proxy as I do for my Apple II Mastodon client, I have released a floppy containing a few useful utilities to get your Apple 2 online.

Files:

You can find the releases on GitHub.

stp.dsk – the floppy image with the FTP client
telnet.dsk – the Telnet floppy
surl-server-buster-YYYY-MM-DD.img.gz – the Raspberry proxy image

If you update the Apple 2 disk, make sure to update the proxy too, sometimes the binary protocol changes. If you already have a surl-server Raspberry running, you can apt update && apt upgrade.

Contents:

STP – an ftp client for the Apple II. This is a simple FTP client that can connect anonymously or using a login to an (S)FTP server. It will allow you to list directories, change directories, get files and put files. If you download an AppleSingle binary file, it will be saved executable so that you can BRUN it.

telnet – a… telnet client for the Apple 2. It will allow you to connect to anything plain text, as long as you know the protocol. It has basic working vt100 emulation, which means you can connect to interactive shells and perform system administration like in the 1990’s. Note: the proxy doesn’t (yet) ship with telnetd.

a2recv – a very basic file transmitter (receiver part). You can send files to it using a2send on the other end of the serial cable, that is, on the surl-server proxy; but you will have to stop the surl-server service first, because the serial connection, unlike a network connection, can not really be shared.

a2send – the counterpart to a2recv.

First step: get the client to a floppy

You can send the stp.dsk or telnet.dsk floppy image to your Apple 2 using ADTPro, which I won’t cover here, as there are a lot of good tutorials available on the web.

Second step: get the proxy ready

You can then prepare the surl-server Raspberry by writing the surl-server-buster-….img file to a MicroSD card (gunzip it first!), and using it with a Raspberry connected to the network via Ethernet, and to the Apple 2 via the USB-serial cable, which other end will be plugged in the Apple 2 serial port #2.

The login/password on the image is the standard Raspbian default login: pi/raspberry. The image is a very standard Raspbian image with surl-server installed via apt.

You can now boot your Apple II with the desired floppy.

Helpers links: