Hardware Requirements
- VIC-20 + 32K expansion
- User-port modem
- Some way to load the program (disk, tape, SD2IEC)
I developed and tested this code using the WiModem from cbmstuff.com (Jim Drew). It should also work with other Internet modems that are able to 'dial' URLs using the following syntax:
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ATDT www.cbc.ca:80
Modem Setup
Be sure to set your modem for 300 baud operation. Usually this is done using the following Hayes commands in a terminal program:
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AT*B300
AT&W
How to Run
Run RSS.PRG as follows:
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LOAD"RSS.PRG",8
RUN
If all is well, the screen will clear, then you should see a row of dots followed by the text:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
and then a few more lines of response from the web server. The RSS reader shows you the first 100 characters of response in order to help debug broken connections. After four lines or so, the RSS reader will stop echoing the output and will begin parsing the data stream (which is assumed to be the XML document containing the RSS data.) As the code parses the input it shows a simple spinner. A horizontal blue bar is shown when a new story tag is encountered. After 30 seconds or so, the first story will be displayed, and then parsing will continue for the following stories in the feed.
Problems?
If there are problems with your setup you may be able to diagnose them with the aid of the first 100 characters of output displayed above. Additionally, the display or LED on your modem can help you determine if a connection was successfully established or not.
This code is very much of alpha quality and has some known bugs. It often crashes or displays corrupt output. In particular some UTF-8 characters in the RSS feed can mess up the screen. Don't trust your life or your livelihood to it!