Roadster

A native AmigaOS Commodity that switches a Roadshow TCP/IP interface on and off, with a live status readout and Ping / TraceRoute built in.

It fills the same role as Graham Thomson's Roadie, which inspired it. Roadster is written from scratch in plain C + GadTools and runs on any 68000+ with Kickstart 2.0+ — it started life chasing crashes on one particular accelerator setup here, and grew into a full replacement.

(live on the Amiga 500 it was written for; icon below)

What it does

• Status line — interface Up/Down and current IP, refreshed every 15 s and after every action. Maintains ENV:RoadshowOnline (Online/Offline) like Roadie did, for OS 3.2 custom title bars.
• Offline / Online — RemoveNetInterface <iface> FORCE / AddNetInterface DEVS:NetInterfaces/<iface>, the pair verified to round-trip on hardware. Deliberately not NetShutdown (a full stack teardown blocks on every program holding a socket, and Roadshow then defers it to fire asynchronously later — a reliable way to crash a busy machine), and not ConfigureNetInterface ONLINE/OFFLINE (an interface taken OFFLINE could not be revived by ONLINE UP on any machine tested). Remove/Add keeps the stack up and re-runs the interface's own config file, like the boot path.
• Status button — full ShowNetStatus dump into the scrolling list.
• Ping / Trace — ping -c 4 / traceroute against the Target host (default 8.8.8.8). Commands run asynchronously: the GUI never freezes, a slow traceroute just ghosts the buttons until it lands.
• Commodity — shows in Exchange, hotkey ctrl alt r toggles the window, the close gadget hides it (Exchange Remove or Ctrl-C quits).

ARexx port ROADSTER (v1.1)

Commands: ONLINE, OFFLINE, SHOW, HIDE, STATUS (returns the status line as the result string), QUIT. rc 5 = busy with another command, rc 10 = unknown command. Needs RexxMast running.

/* example */
address ROADSTER
options results
STATUS
say result      /* e.g. "Status: ONLINE   IP 192.168.1.36" */

Efficiency

Built -Os, ~12 KB binary, no dynamic allocation in normal operation (the listview is a fixed ring pool). The heartbeat timer only runs while a command is in flight or the window is open - a hidden idle commodity sleeps completely.

Interface selection

The interface name is auto-detected as the first file in DEVS:NetInterfaces/. Override with IFACE=<name> — as a CLI argument or an icon tooltype. Works with any Roadshow interface type (Ethernet, SLIP…).

Building

./build.sh under WSL with the amiga-gcc (bebbo) toolchain on PATH. Strip at link time (gcc -s); the standalone m68k-amigaos-strip corrupts hunk relocs on this toolchain.

Files

• src/roadster.c — the whole program
• build.sh — WSL build script
• Roadster-1.1.lha / Roadster.readme — the release archive (built with LhA on a real Amiga) and its Aminet-style readme
• docs/ — screenshots; the GlowIcon ships inside the archive