Potential add-on board?

[kolla]

I give all my Amiga systems a pi (zero), primarily to act as network bridge, giving them wifi (with modern capabilities) and hence avoid the need for cables all over. Bonuses are that the pi also can share filesystems and give Amiga access to USB storage (imagine if someone wrote USB-over-IP driver for Poseidon), playback of music files can be offloaded to the pi, it can act as web proxy and bypass the hurdle of resource hungry modern SSL/TLS handling, giving rsh/rlogin/telnet access solely to the Amiga, it's the "jump host" for ssh out to the world... it also acts as name server, ntp server and whatever else I find useful.

I am curious if it would be possible to network Amiga with Pi directly over parallel port, using the GPIO pins in the Pi. It is of course possible via Plipbox

[kolla]

Sounds like a very clever idea. Any chance of blogging or documenting it?

Hm, yeah, I guess I could do that. Nag me again in a few weeks

I've been trying to setup a connection via a high speed PCMCIA serial port and not getting much success. Ideally I'd like to use the A1200 as programmer and archiver for the various bits of Pi and Arduino that I have.

I was not aware that there are high speed serial port PCMCIA cards that work with Amiga? I have a Silver Surfer that connects to the clock port myself, have not used it yet though... :p

GPIO pins are doable (just my opinion) but you have to be careful if power for the Pi goes that route - there is no protection for reversed polarity or 5V going down the wrong pin to a 3.3V input.

Yes indeed, voltage leveller is needed.

Maybe a dedicated HAT/pHAT specifically made to fit to Amiga parallel port (or even external floppy port - or both) could be a an interesting route to go

[kolla]

Do you set this up as a PPP or SLIP via the serial port?

PPP via serial or ethernet via PCMCIA (or plipbox).

This is an interesting idea. I think the Pi might be able to do it but the protocol would have to tolerate the non-real-time nature Linux running on the Pi.[

OTOH, a parallel port connection to a Pi could expose a bunch of features - network, USB, storage - to an Amiga with the right device drivers:

Code: [Select]


[FONT=Courier New]                                           /-> Net Driver
RPi <--> GPIO <---> PAR Port <---> Amiga <---> USB Driver
Server                             Server  \-> Disk Driver[/FONT]


It'd be a lot of work and probably not very fast but a cheap way of adding features!

Cheers,

Andrew

My thoughts exactly

Another port that is typically not used much - external floppy port. I used to have AmigaLink which gave ethernet-alike network using the floppy port, and it was darn nice.

[kolla]

Back in the days there was Siamese...
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/siamese
http://www.nightvzn.net/portfolio/web/amiga_monitor/archives/1_11html/siamese.htm

This old idea is *much* more appealing today, using for example Raspberry Pi

[kolla]

The floppy port can provide more power than the parallel port but I don't think it would be enough to run a Raspberry Pi, certainly not a V3.

Well, I certainly would not expect to power it through the port. The parallel port also does not have enough power.

I suspect the max transfer speed of a parallel port would be faster than the floppy port. Also, DE-23 connectors are hard to come by

Fair points, but from experience, the parallel port sucks CPU power, whereas what happens on the floppy port can use DMA.

There's a similar project for the Apple ][ called Apple2Pi: http://schmenk.is-a-geek.com/wordpress/?p=167. It uses a serial link to communicate between the Apple and a Pi at 115Kbps.

Right. On Amiga, do not expect more than 57600 baud on the native serial port if you want it to work reliably, on many systems you may even have to drop lower, and CPU will be plenty busy too. Just about anything is better than using the serial port.

I think it would be much easier to build the higher level parts of this using a normal slow null model cable between the Amiga and Pi. The fast low level Parallel to GPIO protocol could be plugged in later.

Well, I already have null-modem, even wireless null modem using bluetooth, any of my Amiga systems can connect to a linux box with bluetooth, that offers PPP and shell login. But working over the serial line really sucks CPU and is very slow. Currently, the best ways to connect a Pi right now, is ethernet, using either PCMCIA or Plipbox. The serial is ok for having the boot console of the Pi though, and "light" data transfers now and then.

I'd probably start by exchanging input events between the two machines so that a USB keyboard and mouse attached to the Pi can generate input events on the Amiga.

I think that is possible already, I did something like that 15-20 years ago, and I suspect I was using this... http://aminet.net/package/comm/tcp/netinput37.3