Ever thought of connecting your rather unexpanded Amiga 500 to the internet via 3G? Crazy? Can´t be done? Of course it can, this is Amiga after all. ;-)
What you will need:- an Amiga with 1 MB RAM and kickstart 2.0 or higher
- a Siemens S55 mobile phone with a data plan
- a Siemens RS232 cable
- a DB-9 to DB-25 adaptor
- TermiteTCP (I used the latest version I know of, which is 1.6).
The special thing about the S55 (and other Siemens models with that connector) is that it behaves like an old analog modem. There are mobile phones from other manufacturers with a serial connection, e.g. some Nokia models like the 5110, but the modem functionality is almost always built into proprietary software and not usable on the Amiga.
To get your 3G (or GPRS, to be precise) connection up and running, you have to configure Termite TCP this way:
- Modem speed: 19200
- Modem init string: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","put.APN.of.your.3G.provider.here"
- telephone number: ATD*99#
- DNS-Server: a valid, public DNS server such as 8.8.8.8 (Google)
That´s about it! Dial up the connection and you will be able to e.g. telnet to your favorite BBS or download some files via FTP with the included telnet/ftp software. I read that grapevine IRC can be used with Termite TCP aswell, but I didn´t try.
Second approachAfter getting that far, I realized that there is one major drawback: Kickstart 2.0. While most A500 users upgraded to 1 MB RAM quite early, I think the majority is still equipped with kickstart 1.x. After digging around in aminet for a while, I found one single TCP/IP stack which is compatible with kickstart 1.x: AmigaNOS, the Amiga port of the "network operating system" originally created for MS-DOS. There are a couple of different versions around, none of them is really fully documented. I tried
AmigaNOSGW6 from aminet because this version is capable of dialling, the other version on aminet isn´t. I fought with it almost 1 day and gave up in the end. I got it quite far actually, it started a ppp connection and spit out a PAP authentication prompt, but I think this version lacks the ability to receive a dynamically assigned IP address + default gateway from the provider. Without that, you´re pretty much lost. Anyway, if somebody wants to play with it, here is what I figured out so far:
- Create a dialer script "nos-dial" with the following content:
timeout 1200
send ATZ
wait OK
send AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","put.APN.of.your.3G.provider.here"
wait OK
send ATD*99#
send AT+CGDATA=PPP,1
- Create a NOS startup-script "nos-ppp" with the following content:
autodial nos-dial
attach asy serial.device 0 ppp ppp0 4096 1500 19200 0
hostname amiga500
domain addserver 8.8.8.8
Fire up AmigaNOSGW with the following command:
AmigaNOSGW nos-pppThis will bring up an interface ppp0 attached to serial.device and automatically dial in. You will get a popup with username/password (my provider doesn´t validate this, so I could fill in anything). If somebody figures out how to receive a dynamic IP address on ppp0 + the default gateway, I am eagerly awaiting the solution. ;-)
What next?Well, since the above approaches are of somewhat limited use (no SANA-II API), I am planning to create a bootable disk with AmiTCP/IP and some ppp.device for 3G connection. Just fill in your APN and go. But this will take some time.
Thanks for reading. ;-)
written on my A500 with Ed 1.14
