Streaming RealAudio From a Commodore 64
An anonymous reader submits: "This just came in on comp.sys.cbm and
I think it will be of general interest here at Slashdot as well. Two
Commodore hackers, Adam Dunkels and Peter Eliasson, have built an
Ethernet card for their C64 and have connected one to the
Internet. But they aren't 'just' running a TCP/IP stack and a web server on it - they are also
running a RealAudio server which streams audio from the C64's cassette
player and apparently, it sounds awful! They have the full source code
avaliable and pictures of the
C64 server."
Holy shit! This thing is still standing! I was able to get through with just two tries (the first time I just got the frameset). According to the docs they had put in quite a few optimizations to their TCP/IP stack to allow for a lot of connections (they said they encoded the state data in TCP sequence field, allowing them to have unlimited connections, or something like that)
:P
The thing is, they haven't got the optimization on port 6510, so if you try to go to the 'tcp status page' you'll overload it.
Building a C64 web server is impressive. Building one that can stand up to the Slashdot effect is, well, wow
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It has now been four and a half hours since this appeared on the front page, and our C64 server is still up and running.
/index.html page and only 1% have been for the RealPlayer description file /c64.ram.
I was just able to reach the access statistics page. There has been a total of 32000 accesses (of which 8000 came before the Slashdot attack). 25% of the accesses have been for the
24000 hits in 4.5 hours, thats nearly 1.5 hits per second.
This is a cool project. /. should add a new category called, "Because You Can." You see, there are a lot of wicked projects that we cover here, but they're not so much funny as, "This is totally sweet." (e.g. linux on ____, webserver on _____, and now of course, real-audio streaming on _____).
Invariably when we cover these, you get a few responses like this: "Why would you ever want to do this... blah blah."
Invariably, the response is: "Because you can."
The next step, of course, after creating such a category, is to make sure it's mirrored well before it's posted. (*wistful look*)
Now, I haven't checked whether this story is a hoax or not, but if it is, then it should be in the "Funny" category. Otherwise, consider this post as a call for a new category called, "Because you can!"