Kludging Amigas, emulator and linux/PC together?

[RW222]

Hi all,

Posted in general, coz this is likely to wander between soft, hard, emulation and other issues, didn't see where it fit. Might be asking more specific questions in those areas later...

Here's what I have...
A1200 with Apollo A1220 and 4MB fast RAM, kludged up 3.5 IDE interface. Kickstart 3.0 OS 3.0
A500 x2 (one early one late, one has 1.3, the other might have 2.0 and be plus spec) some sort of trapdoor RAM board (if the battery hasn't eaten it), some A500 HDD interface and HDD (SCSII??) some A1000 sidecar RAM expansion (that can be got to work upside down and backwards on an A500 can't it???)
2x "Amiga" 880K external floppy drives.
1x generic external floppy drive (might be high density)
1x Amiga 5.25 floppy drive.
A2000? Amiga keyboard.
Prizm wireless cards
3Com PCMCIA ethernet cards
Generic PCMCIA ethernet cards
Whole load of PC parts with amiga potential, SCSI, IDE, optical (and with drivers rumored to exist) Voodoo3, S3, soundcards, ethernet cards...
Whole load of other PC bits, enough to put a couple of 1Ghz+ machines together, but might not be able to exceed 256MB RAM in any one system.

Not too clear on the A500s because they were aquired and stashed in the last few years and didn't get to set up and play with them much. Also missed the A500 era mostly, my first Amiga was the A1200 right after release, so not so familiar with them.

So here's what I want to get set up...
Network the A500s to the A1200, using any protocol and cheap cabling method, enabling mounting their drives on the A1200. Remote command execution desirable (even if it's just a shell) One A500 will be expanded as far and as cheaply as possible. It will get the RAM expansion(s) the HDD interface and 2 external floppies and be the workhorse "disk donkey" for copying and backing up. The other will get whatevers left and will be mostly just used for older games I guess.

Then I want some kind of TCP/IP ethernet connection on the A1200, have apparently suitable PCMCIA cards and wireless cards. To connect to...

Some kind of Amiga functional setup on a dedicated PC, PC to be loaded up with storage. Now, would there be any point in making an Amiga specific hardware configuration such as compatible graphics cards etc, and making an AROS native system? It would end up running UAE most of the time I think. Would UAE be able to use hardware that was amiga compatible directly? I want to network with UAE running on the PC from the A1200 and would like very much to have a remote desktop on the A1200. i.e. use the UAE system for crunching and resource demanding applications. (Given that on a 1.6G+ AMD it's faster than my '020+882 @ 28Mhz) I'd also like the PC to provide interfaces to printers, scanners, cameras, etc. maybe not directly for the capture devices but that PC has to be able to use them then I can snag the data off easy onto the A1200. Also would want to mount ISO files for access as mountable network drives. So I'm wondering if AROS is ready for that sort of stuff yet or whether I should be hosting UAE on linux. Potentially I could have an AROS machine seperate. Last time I played with AROS, (years ago, hosted on linux) it was immature I guess, just clicked around for a few mins, then thought "that's neat, now what?" , exited and went back to playing with UAE and the A1200.


So basically, I want the A1200 as the interface to it all. There's something about the "feel" of a real amiga, emulation doesn't feel right. Though I'd possibly have the UAE setup with monitor and keyboard alongside the A1200.

Anyhoo, what do I need to make this all work. I'm thinking that between the Amigas, there was some sort of fast SANA connection possible with custom cables connecting the floppy ports. Think it's on Aminet somewhere. I was wondering about parallel cable type connections. I've hacked up PLIP type cables before. There was a SANA type one for Amiga<>Amiga networking. I'm wondering if that could be used from the A1200 to UAE to provide a more "direct" SANA interface between them for a more amiga native network. Even though I guess large transfers would be slower than going over TCP/IP. I've found PLIP type stuff bearable in the past, lot more bearable than serial anyway, even if you get it to work at 115Kbps. But then I wonder how the PC parallel port is made available to UAE, is it output only? Figuring out how to translate an amiga<>amiga cable pinout to amiga<>pc where the PC side is emulating could be interesting ... :roll:

Then I'm wondering if any of the amiga<>amiga networking utilities can actually be tunnelled successfully over TCP/IP between the A1200 and UAE and/or AROS, or whether I'm just stuck with common protocols like samba.

Lost track of UAE and AROS development for a few years, last UAE I had much experience with was a dos version, and it was running almost A500 speed with frameskip of 4 on a P233 @320x200, the docs still mentioned needing a 600Mhz pentium and fire extinguisher for full speed full frame rate emulation as I recall :lol:

Anyhoo, just wondering if people can help me weed out the stuff that definitely will not work for the sort of thing I want to do, before I waste too much time trying to configure it. Then what the most likely avenues of approach are for everything else.

thanks for any hints...

RW222

[Matt_H]

It'll be extremely complicated, but Envoy can do what you desire. The hardest part, believe it or not, will probably be integrating the real Amiga network with the emulation on the PC. As I recall, WinUAE doesn't emulate a specific piece of network hardware, it just presents a network interface that allows TCP/IP to work transparently. That means no SANA-II driver for Envoy to use. Don't know if this is still the case, but there are some other tricks you can try.

You'll definitely need to make some Parallel cables. You can link the 500s via Serial and then use the Parallel port on one to link to the 1200. (The floppy-port networking interface is a full piece of hardware, not just a cable, so finding one now will be an extreme challenge).

With some clever gateway configuration, you should be able to get Envoy to access all machines. The 1.3 one will require some extra thinking as Envoy is Kickstart 2.x+ only. A 1.3 and 2.x compatible network program (check Aminet) could be run on both 500s (mounting the 1.3 drives on the 2.x one) and then Envoy could re-export the networked drives to the 1200. Performance will be abysmal, but it could work.

The 1200 could in turn re-share everything via Samba (using a PCMCIA card to access standard Ethernet), which SMBFS on UAE might be able to handle. If not, use Windows to mount the drives and then add them to UAE.

[RW222]

Ahh no SANA on the UAE side  :headwall: Though was just browsing aminet and there was something for SANAtising some cslip or other connection. I guess that might be forced to work with another TCP/IP interface with some fiddling.

The floppy interface thing... I knew there was a "long range" commercial network interface available, with line drivers or modulators to a coax or TP line, for room to room or office to office (AmiLink??)... but I also seem to remember a "short range" one that could connect to machines on the same desk, only suitable for a few feet due to using most of the lines on the interface. Can't remember what it was called. Was just looking at aminet hoping to find it, but don't see anything obvious. I feel a bit lost there at the moment, due to the different directory tree they have now (since when?) it's possible it's one of the files without a good readme showing, don't have any lha utils installed on this machine to look at packages that sound like maybes. It's also possible it was pulled or lost, in which case, I hope it's on one of the CDs I have somewhere or I have it DLed to disk somewhere.

Hmmm if I have to use parallel, I wonder if I can build/use any of those A500 i/o expander projects for 2 parallel ports.

[Matt_H]

You could ask the developer of WinUAE if full SANA-II emulation is in the works. Emulation of specific SCSI interfaces (A2091) has been added lately, so maybe Ethernet isn't far off (A2065).

[RW222]

Aha.... maybe this was what I was thinking of...

http://aminet.net/package/comm/net/diskserial

up to 31KB a second sounds pretty darn fast really. Wonder if that's a typo for 31 Kilobits/sec, but then 5 Kilobits/sec on an A500 sounds too slow.  

[Matt_H]

:bump:

@ RW222

There's a new version of WinUAE (1.4.5) with the direct SANA-II emulation I was talking about.