Cheap Ethernet solution for Classic Amigas

[danwood]

Lol, yessum, we all know that - I have several A1200s and even an ACA630 equipped A600 using a pcmcia Ethernet solution.
 
However, this is not a solution for the A500 and A1000. It is a Phoenix equipped A1000 that I was intending to do this to.

Ok, to be fair you did say 1200...

Just think, we could all be playing Dynamite online and chatting in real time with our ole' 1200s!

[3583Bytes]

I am in the same boat, if someone had a $100 solution for internet (even slow) for my Amiga 500 I would totally buy it.  Specially now that I ordered a ACA 500 for mine, it will be a much more useful machine.

Currently I have 2 cheap solutions, one is use a Linux computer or Raspberry Pi and access the internet via it's console shell (Lynx).  This is rather more limited but it works on all Amigas even the Amiga 1000 with WB 1.3.

I wrote a tutorial on how to do this.

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=67191

Second is use a Raspberry Pi or Linux machine (virtual or physical) to host a PPP connection over Serial.  I am still working on that since there is no clear Amiga tutorial that gives you the whole picture.  But I think I am close, once I get it going I will share a tutorial with the correct settings.


Also I am sick of everyone always pointing to getting a 1200 as a solution.  They are rare in North America and expensive to ship from EU.  The commodore 64 has a version of Lynx and can easily (slowly) surf the internet for about $100, the Amiga 500/2000 should be able to as well.

[Themamboman]

Has anyone ever done any speed testing on the plipbox?  

I thought someone was going to a few months ago, but never saw anything in the forum thread.

Thanks!

[danbeaver]

A modem and dialup connection are cheaper and was the standard 20 years ago; Termite TCP and IBrowse worked fine and I still have my original disks.  As for the A500 and A2000, I still have AppleTalk networking hardware and software that put them online 20 years ago.  But for modern Cerfing, I would get a more modern computer and A1200's are available to US buyers, as are all the other models with the A2000 still able to handle "moderate" Cerfing with a NIC, RTG, and an accelerator.

[abraXXious]

Ok, to be fair you did say 1200...

Lol, I actually said that facetiously, as in to say "think of all the low end classic miggies that could benefit from it to go online" - Dynamite was the first thing that came to mind that could use such internet access, and from memory Dynamite needs AGA at a minimum..... or will it run in OCS/ECS?

[abraXXious]

Yessum, I don't consider using another system as a file server/terminal as a proper solution as then the host machine is not a standalone system - very messy.
 
 The sad thing is my C64 has native Ethernet access via my MMC64 / RR-Net setup. Along with the IDE64 it has attached, I have access to 400GB of high speed disk access, a DVD Burner and Ethernet.... in fact, the Telnet client available for the C64 is amazing....
 
 .... and this is a <1mhz C64!!!
 
 Surprisingly, no one has written an Amiga driver for the RR-Net even though it plugs into the MMC64 clockport which itself is a clone of the Amiga clockports.
 
 From memory Jens looked into it and said there was no point as the way the RR-Net worked (some form of polling system) you could only get about 50kb per second from it. This is crazy as 50kb per second would be HEAPS for 99.9% of classic Amiga networking.
 
 Only 10 years ago most of the world was using V90 dial up modems which can get 5kb per second on a good day. This was fine for browsing then, you cant tell me TEN times that is not good enough for basic browsing now?
 
 Of course, with a classic miggy you are not going to be visiting youtube etc etc, so 50kb per second would be loads.

[3583Bytes]

Yessum, I don't consider using another system as a file server/terminal as a proper solution as then the host machine is not a standalone system - very messy.
 
The sad thing is my C64 has native Ethernet access via my MMC64 / RR-Net setup. Along with the IDE64 it has attached, I have access to 400GB of high speed disk access, a DVD Burner and Ethernet.... in fact, the Telnet client available for the C64 is amazing....
 
.... and this is a <1mhz C64!!!
 
Surprisingly, no one has written an Amiga driver for the RR-Net even though it plugs into the MMC64 clockport which itself is a clone of the Amiga clockports.
 
From memory Jens looked into it and said there was no point as the way the RR-Net worked (some form of polling system) you could only get about 50kb per second from it. This is crazy as 50kb per second would be HEAPS for 99.9% of classic Amiga networking.
 
Only 10 years ago most of the world was using V90 dial up modems which can get 5kb per second on a good day. This was fine for browsing then, you cant tell me TEN times that is not good enough for basic browsing now?
 
Of course, with a classic miggy you are not going to be visiting youtube etc etc, so 50kb per second would be loads.

Totally agree, my c64 can get online easily, the A500/1000 should as well.

[freqmax]

If one blasts the parallell port in output mode on Amiga without waiting for any external unit how long is the cycle time?