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Streaming RealAudio From a Commodore 64

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the you'll-be-stone-dead-in-a-moment dept.

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."

11 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. A note for youngsters.. by tuxzone · · Score: 5, Funny

    A note for youngsters... The C64 is not a fancy new 64 bit machine, it is an 8 bit machine (vintage 1982) with 64Kbyte memory.

  2. Listen... by soulsteal · · Score: 5, Funny

    and you might hear the crackle of a flaming C64...

  3. To paraphrase RFK (or Shaw): by Ezubaric · · Score: 5, Funny

    Some people see things as they are and say why. I see things that never were and say why not.

    Then again, some people say "why not," get drunk, and and hook a piece of crap up to the internet.

    $50 bucks to the first person that builds a C64 emulator out of legos that streams video of a coffeepot and runs BSD.

    --

    ----------
    I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
  4. Hrm... by autopr0n · · Score: 5, Funny

    I bet that ethernet card probably has more CPU power then the rest of the machine.

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  5. well duh! by binarybum · · Score: 5, Funny


    C'mon now, Real Audio(TM) always sounds awful. This isn't news!

    --
    ôó
  6. Still up! by autopr0n · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

    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 :P

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  7. Powerful peripherals by Novus · · Score: 5, Informative

    On the whole, lots of peripherals and expansion cards back then had ridiculous amounts of processing power. For example, the floppy drive usually used on the C64, the 1541, had a 6502 processor (a slightly older version of the 6510 used in the C64 itself). C64 facts from here. The floppy drive was connected to the machine with an insanely slow serial port, so it had to work more or less autonomously.

    The silliest example of over-powerful peripherals has to be the General Sound card for the ZX Spectrum. The General Sound contains a 12 MHz Z80 and 128 K RAM, upgradable to 512. The Spectrum contains 48 or 128 K RAM (256 or 512 on some clones) and has a 3.5 MHz Z80 (7 MHz or more in some clones). In other words, the sound card (which is fully programmable) is more than 3 times as powerful as the machine it's connected to. General Sound info here.

    For today, ponder the latest 3D graphics accelerator.

    1. Re:Powerful peripherals by vidarh · · Score: 5, Funny
      Actually, the 6502 is close enough to the 6510 that your C64 most likely will keep running if you exchange the two. The difference is primarily 8 extra IO lines on the 6510. On the C64 some of those were, I believe (but it's been about 15 years :-) used to access the tapedeck.

      For an even more extreme example of extra CPU's (though not necessarily much more powerful, and two of them not in use :-), I at one point had an Amiga 2000 with a 68000 CPU. I got a used 68020 accelerator board for it. In addition it had one of those PC cards that let you run DOS in a window, with an 8086, and an 286 accelerator for it. To top it off my SCSI card had a Z80 on it.

      But one CPU is missing....

      Guess what is used as a keyboard controller on many of the Amigas? An embedded version of the 6510, running at 2MHz and with onboard RAM and ROM..

      So to sum it up, the CPUs in use: 68020, 286, Z-80 and some chip with an 6510 core. Now that's multiprocessing :-)

  8. From one of the creators by adadun · · Score: 5, Informative

    As one of the guys who made this, I must say that I am amazed to see how well our C64 server is handling the Slashdot-effect. With a little more than 50 comments, I still can load parts of the first page.

    The web server that runs on port 80-84 actually implements a simple form of overload protection and during testing, we managed to serve 8000 pages over a period of 30 minutes. That makes 4 pages per second! Note that it is only the first page that is overload protected, so the other pages will still load very slow (if they will have a chance to load at all!).

    The real-time streaming audio server is running on the same machine as the web server so nobody will probably have a chance to hear the audio stream.

    Furthermore, the headline is wrong - we are not streaming RealAudio. We are streaming audio using the open RTSP/RTP formats that RealPlayer and other players can handle. The RealAudio file format is secret so we would probably have been sued if we had been streaming that.

    Finally, here is Google's cache of our newsgroup announcement.

  9. Re:My goodness. by BobTheBooser · · Score: 5, Informative
    Anyways, how in the hell were they able to reverse real audio encoding?

    They didn't they implemented a version of the standard RTSP/RTP protocal. This is an open standard similar to TCP/IP standard. It just happens to be the standard that Real Player uses for its protocal.

    The RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) is a standard (RFC2326) session initiation/maintenance protocol that is used by RealPlayer, QuickTime, and many other real-time audio and video players.
  10. Access statistics update by adadun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 /index.html page and only 1% have been for the RealPlayer description file /c64.ram.

    24000 hits in 4.5 hours, thats nearly 1.5 hits per second.