Miked wrote:
Hmm, is there any way to connect a cable from the serial, parallel or floppy port to an internet router and be on my way? It seems, aside from an ethernet card or regular modem, there is no "direct" way to gain internet access.
You can run PPP, SLIP, or PLIP to an appropriate "server" over the serial or parallel ports. This would either be a desktop PC*, or, I suppose, an appropriately hacked router that bothers to feature a serial port.**
*The 'conventional' way to to do this would be with a BSD or Linux box of some flavor, though there's various software for Windows -- possibly including any server features of "Dial-Up-Networking" -- to pull it off, too. One package was popularized for Psion and Palm users in the '98 days, but I forget its name.
**Certain flavors of Linksys/Netgear/D-Link hardware could conceivably be bodged up to pull this off (see
The OpenWRT Project page for a starting point), but that's a fair bit of tinkering unless you really demand it.
I gather the Amiga serial port can be a little anemic with the stock CIA/UART; a friend of mine was using a PLIP (parallel) setup back in the day with FreeBSD and seemed pleased. You'll have to be rather careful with the pinout of the cable, and find the appropriate software.
