swift240 wrote:
Hi all,
I have got a new mobo for my PC an AMD athlone semprone CPU 2000.
The mobo has got an Ethernet card onboard, so I am using that get gain Internet access. I Have put the older Ethernet card inside the PC aswell, for a reason.
Although my Amiga 1200 is fine using the internet with its own Ethernet on the Mediator, I am thinking of either a parallel to parallel or going MS connection sharing via the spare Ethernet card on the PC.
I'm not aware of any parallel-to-parallel solutions between Amiga and PC, but I might not keep enough track. Serial-to-Serial would be more common, either would be painfully slow versus ethernet, quite true.
The sole reason is that I want to gain access to my Lexmark X1180 printer/scanner connected to my PC, and to share photos from the PC to my Amiga.
What would be the fastest and best method to use for this purpose?
Do you already have a home router, or are you trading cables onto the Amiga when you want it online?
The easiest, "sanest" thing will be to get one of those gadgets, use it to give some dim level of firewall protection to your Windows machine, take advantage of the inbuilt hub most have to get your PC and Amiga permanently wired up,
then try to tackle the software.
ICS will work and is 'cheaper' (since you've all the parts for it), but you'll need to pick up a hub or "crossover cable" anyway, and it adds extra variables to the XP configuration that will annoy you unless you're well-versed in IP. (If you already have a home router and both machines plugged into it, you don't need to switch off to ICS to do what you want!)
After you get the network going... Whew, good question. There are probably more elegant ways, but assuming there's absolutely no Amiga support for the Lexmark, my first thought would be to set up sort of FTP (or CIFS) drop-box or web app on the Windows side... Then, if your Amiga apps let you "print to a file" in some sort of format Windows can eat, that might be the sanest thing (and with the 'dropbox' on a Samba mount, it could even be fairly transparent)... Could be that there's a better way to do it, but this is how I'd get it done if there were no other way.