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Finally: Broadband for the Commodore 64
GP writes "Now even die-hard Commodore 64 users are able to enjoy the benefits of broadband Internet connectivity. A newly announced Ethernet card together with the Contiki operating system lets you surf the web, send e-mail, host web sites with the built-in web server, and soon even play LAN games on your good old Commodore 64! All this with a computer that is old enough to drink."
Now I can play Tank! With my friends in Iraq!
It'll be the first ever time the CPU bus is a bottleneck to the Internet connection
All this with a computer that is old enough to drink
Am I the only person who has no idea just what in the hell that is supposed to mean?
And oh yeah, good job on the ethernet stuff for the C64.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
As we all know, the standard is whether or not something can "flood a 10BaseT network". Anyone who has read the networking HOWTOs know that Pentium 100's can "do this easily".
So...can it? If not, how much traffic do I have to send it to bring it to a crawl? :-)
Please help metamoderate.
"...All this with a computer that is old enough to drink." uh....to drink? since when do things get so old that you can drink them?
Does this mean that some day, following a screwy bit of logical progression, I'll be able to run WindowMaker on my TI-56?
I can hardly wait! *hop*
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I was beginning to fear that I would have to upgrade at some point!
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
Okay, start posting "C= 64 was the 'my first'/'last real'/'first real'/'best' computer/piece of crap" messages.
I finally got networked play going for my Atari 2600.
I gotta tell you, being able to play "Combat" head-to-head over the Internet is an absolute revolution in gaming!
any DSL modem or router is probably at least a hundred times faster than a C64.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You can see the AMD square/arrow logo on the corner of one of the chips. Cool.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Then you haven't configured the thing properly. I used a 386DX-20 as a firewall for a cable modem for a couple of years and it had no problem with >1024kbps.
(Anonymous non-karma w***e posting.)
13.09.2003: Retro Replay and RR-Net available
In time with the announced date, the new production run of the Retro Replay is finished. Compared to the old cartridges, only cosmetic changes have been made: The most significant change is the colour: Blue instead of black. After many requests by users, the jumpers are now mounted straight, not to the side. To ensure proper mounting in our new cases, the mounting hole has been moved and changed in diameter to perfectly fit the transparent cases.
At the same time, the networking card RR-Net is going on sale. The card is plugged to the expansion port of the Retro Replay, and allows connecting the C64 to an intranet. Although the operating system Contiki is freeware, we have an agreement with the author Adam Dunkels: He gets paid for every RR-Net unit that's sold. Contiki is an operating system that offers many features in very small space: A TCP/IP stack, a web browser, a webserver, a VNC-client and of course a graphical user interface. It is included on a 5,25 inch disk for the C64. To make use of all features of Contiki, an intranet with router should be available.
As an introductory offer, there's a network-bundle. It contains:
# Retro Replay
# RR-Net with Contiki
# transparent case
# worldwide shipment
together for only 100,- EUR!
Please use the contact form for your order. Unfortunately, our domain ami.ga does not work at the moment, because the republic of Gabon is currently migrating their internet connection from satellite to undersea cable. Even with our server in Germany, both the website and email addresses are affected, but the contact form works reliably!
It's been done before: http://www.dunkels.com/adam/tfe/
Get ready for lots of 40-column width formatted Slashdot postings! :)
Wow, and the way that the contiki webbrowser is designed you can even view site like slashdot who's html is larger than the amount of RAM in the machine itself!
Your junk C=64 machine sucks. My Atari rules. ATASCII is soo much better than that ugly ASCII you have to use.
I was going to post this in all caps like any kid back then would have, but I decided to save everyone's eyes. (I think the lameness filter would have stoped that)
Really? In my day we used to have 386/33 machines with 4 10Mbit ethernet cards running Novell Netware, and several large hard disks. You're not running Windows, by any chance are you?
Stick Men
imagine a whole beowulf cl....ahh forget it.
Go read some bible: nubible.com
In a shocking fit of synchronicity, I stumbled upon a java aplet version of Lords of Conquest, and have been playing for the last hour...an hour before this story was posted...
Ah, the good ol days. Who said you could never go back?
What a great idea to limit bandwidth usage. Hookup up a C64 as a firewall and *presto* you are blocking ports and keeping the P2P usage down to 2K/sec. Burn the firewall code to a start-up cartridge ROM, make the C64 run off a 12V battery with a DC-DC converter for the needed +/-5V. Throw the whole thing in a black box with a solar panel on top and sell it as the next big thing in network security.
20% of the people in the world are hungry.
Shouldn't you be out feeding them instead of:
1) reading slashdot
2) reading a story on slashdot you don't think is worthy
3) reading, and then commenting on a story on slashdot that you don't think is worthy
By your line of reasoning, nearly everything is offtopic and not relevant except for the bare necessities of life. What a very painful existance you must lead.
I and (perhaps) all the rest of the Europeans out there thought: Old enough to drink... For a nice burgandy that probably means '94.
D.
use Blunt::Instrument;
The important thing to learn from this is that when it comes down to what the average user wants to do with a computer, the new ultra fast Xtreme P4 is not necessary. Surfing the web, email, and word processing can be done with a sub $100 computer system given the correct software.
This also brings up the sheer amount of unneccessary bloat in alot of software today.
----
Squirrel
*** Commodore 64 for slashcode ***
*** PerlBasic 0.9, for C64, BY A.C ***
*** 32095904383 basic bytes free ***
READY.
0 REM BSD IS DYING.
1 EINIT, JBQ0, 127.0.0.1
2 LPIPL,HTTP,"E"
10 JLX,E,ROX,40,slashdot,org,80
20 ROXP, SDPS, goatse.
30 PJP 20
40 ?RD, 0
PL, BB$59!
THE GOATSE.CX LAWYER SAID WE NEEDED A
WARNING, SO IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 OR YOU
ARE USING A COMMODORE 64, PLEASE DON'
T LOOK AT IT! THANK YOU
[ stinger ]
BSD IS DYING!
"Don't mod this down just because you disagree. Look at the logic."
Some of us make a living from this geek stuff. Can't feed people if I have no money. Your logic is faulty.
"Derp de derp."
It's not in manual but let me reveal:
you can connect an original arcade(r) stick to the internet adaptor. By wiggling it left-right really fast you can help the adaptor process packets, thus upgrading its speed.
There must be somebody out there who's really desperate for a good Slashdotting of their Commodore 64.
ah, kicked that submit button too fast...
:-)
The RR-Net Ethernet card is a re-design and logical continuation of the TFE Ethernet card, for which Contiki was originally written. The RR-Net and the TFE are built upon the same Ethernet controller chip: the CS8900a, which has an 8-bit mode and is very well suited for interfacing with 8-bit CPUs and microcontrollers.
I am actually running Contiki together with an RR-Net Ethernet card on my 10 MBit/s broadband connection myself. Of course, it isn't actually possible to saturate the connection with the C64, but at least it is possible to finally use a C64 with the Internet without having to go through a PC, which is quite satisfying
It seems to me that if those things are OFF TOPIC, then any recreational activity is as well. Should we do nothing in life except sustain ourselfves just enough so that we can follow worthwhile causes? If that's the case, then I must be a pretty terrible person, since the only hungry person I help feed is my room-mate.
"20% of the people in the world do not have enough to eat."
Wrong. 18% of people in DEVELOPING COUNTRIES don't have enough to eat, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. 12% of the global population is malnourished. The numbers are huge enough as it is without getting them wrong.
"Don't mod this down just because you disagree."
No, mod it down because it's wrong.
It's bad enough that people who try putting their C64 on the Internet will probably lose all of their valuable data. What really worries me, though, is a plague of dozens of zombie C64 machines under the control of hackers bringing down valuable services like Google and Yahoo with DDoS attacks.
It means that, in order to run at a decent speed, you have to overclock the C64's 6502 so much that it requires a water cooling setup.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
How about old enough to run for President?
Wow, another bleeding heart telling us we should feel bad if we don't spend all our waking hours taking care of the poor people.
You say case mods, games and broadband are not relevant or on topic? This is slashdot, this is not 'SaveTheWorld.org'
How totally pissed off and white do you have to be in order to walk around 100% of the time consumed with guilt that others are hungry? How arrogant must you be to come to a tech site and tell us how uninlightened we are because we are speaking about technical things.
Go preach your tree hugging gospel elsewhere please. This is "News for Nerds" not "Articles about Social Issues" as your site claims to be.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I would compare the stock 64 speed with it to about a 600 baud terminal connection (not bad for 1mghz displaying in hi-res mode), easy enough to read without stopping the stream (there is no buffer in the web browser, sice contiki uses a lot of the 64's 58k or so of accessible memory.)
With the C64 20 mghz accellerator, SuperCPU (by CMD - now offered by Commodore Key,) the speed matches a modern PC - albeit a slower one.
To sum it up, given the tight memory and small amount of hardware needed now - it sure opens up opportunities for some low-end internet projects. (even grander ones when people with RAM expansions start developing for it) I hope one day someone makes a Commodore C/G BBS and C64 Telenet Client using them or maybe a internet variation of the old Commodore Q-Link network (Q-Link was AOL before they became AOL).
Also with the eventual release of the ultra-cool reconfigurable computer - the C-One (which can use the RR-Net card) and Jeri Ellsworth's (she created the C-One) work on an Apple II interface which I believe also has similar capabilities - you are proably going to hear about a lot more 8-bitters on the internet with their little computers. :-)
But realistically I am hoping 'The Final Ethernet' card (which is just the Ethernet adapter interfaced to the 64) gets developed though, using the Retro Replay Utility Cartridge as an intemediary ads a buch of $$ to the price (I'm a Commodore fanatic, I had to buy one, not everyone would like those prices though.)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
You said:
All this with a computer that is old enough to drink
so I poured a beer into mine, and now it doesn't work...
It's just not the same as the feeling I got when my 300 baud modem finally came in the mail that fateful day, now that was broadband back then. I remember dialing up to Q-Link, which I believe became AOL. I remember picking up a Basic game programming book and not leaving my computer room for 3 days until I had programmed and saved them all. I may have to dig out the old keyboard and try this for myself. I think my monitor is wonky though. And I do have that sweet 128 cartridge that plugs into the back of the keyboard. Blue screen=good, green screen=even better.
I hate sigs.
If I had a C64, I'd be happy to hook it, (or anything else), up to broadband. If it was available where I live, that is.
Thanks for nothing Verizon...
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
In the spirit of an ethernet card for the C64 I'm working on the following:
1. Climbing with gear from the 1800's
2. Souping up a Model T
3. Creating a fully automatic muzzle loader
4. Compression scemes for 5.25" floppies
5. Teaching a VERY old dog new tricks
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Ah yes, it was the guy at humanclock.com that said he was using a tandy trs 80 as a webserver
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
Most home computers of that era, like C64 or ZX Spectrum wrote their data on tape with ca 1500-2000 bit/s by default. Many games (originally packaged) used their own loading routines with speeds up to 4000 bps in order to load faster. You could go higher over 6000 bps, but the risk of getting read errors was too high.
The important thing is, the read/write routines were CPU-timed, they used short loops to precisely time the moment to switch between 1 and 0 on output. These loop have a natural precision limit of 1 loop, which would be x CPU cycles (7 on Z80??? or 10? I don't remember correctly). You could reach maybe 100000 bps (theoretically) with this principle, but practically you'd have too many errors.
That's because its CPU doesn't have Intel's NetBurst technology!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The worst part was the errors in the listings of source code in the magazines. A whole lot of typing just to see the program not actually work.
Ah, yes, those were the days...
It made a dorm mate's Macintosh seem nothing short of miraculous when I went to my first year of college a couple of years later.
Using a C64 to cruise the Internet? That would be a strange experience indeed!
Quoth he
"It's all academic anyway..."
Just let it go, people. _Let it go_ already.
I had one of these machines when I was a kid. I outgrew BASIC fairly rapidly and started coding in assembly. My blue 6502 Assembly book was so dog eared that it made neighborhood beagles jealous. While I was taking calculus in college, I wrote a crude ray tracer that output 16 colored blocks and attempted to use screen refresh rates to eek more than 16 colors out of each text cell. I'm as big a fan of the machine as anyone, but it's time has passed.
Now, however, both the CELL PHONE AND PDA IN MY POCKET have more beef than a C=64.
I mean, if you're going to mod something from that era, at least use a C-128D. There's so much more room in the case.
Weird but kinda neat... how many computers do you know where you can write an upward-slanting diagonal, multi-coloured string with a single PRINT statement?
This reminds me of the only single-line animation program I've ever seen... It was basically (no pun intended):Where {cX} are cursor codes for up, down, left, and right.
Ahh.. those were the days. Reaching for the power switch was the longest part of bootup time, and nary a bit was wasted. BASIC interpreter in 8KB, DOS in 8KB, and a complete graphical OS (GEOS) in 64KB. And a dozen games on a 170K floppy
I think it's time to dig up an emulator and play some Impossible Mission, Space Taxi, and Jumpman
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I tend to disagree. If a 486 can't push that many K/s, it's not the processor's fault, but the OS (and the program you try to push with).
On my mac G4 450 Mhz (hardly a rocket), Camino browser easily d/l's @ 200 K/s, while MS Explorer can't go higher than 50 K/s, and then goes down in speed. It's terrible!
Actually, I think this misconception of the speed of the 486 is due to people who are
1. Using serial port communications
2. Have a crappy serial port
I got this faulty logic when I was hunting for a SCSI rom drive for a 486sx PS/2. I was told by the staff "oh, it's a 486, well they can't use anything but a 1x drive anyway" and it's like "oh really, so I guess I have to use a 1x hard disk cause modern ones are just too damn fast".
My 8bit experence is pretty limited to the Atari, but I did own a scsi controler and had a 1meg ramdisk and let me tell you there was a serious peformance increase. Given the fact that it's practicaly impossible to get replacement drives and such for these vintage computers, it makes sence to go ethernet.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
That machine is a beast compared to a C64.
The first box I had after the C64 was a 80286 cruising along at a blazing 16mhz, and that was a quantum leap upgrade. The C64 plodded along at a piddly 1mhz, with a whopping 64kilobytes of ram. I'd be real surprised if the C64 could utilize a fast connection, especially since all the data is running over serial cables for god's sake.
Not to be a bastard, but I've got an obsolete TI-83 calculator sitting on my desk which can do anything a C64 can do, and I don't have to lug around a 30 pound floppy drive to use it.
Just my opinion. Flame away.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
From a cursory glance at the board, it looks like it plugs into the user port. That means it has access to the data lines from the 6526 VIA, which yields a single memory-mapped address for I/O.
...I think that adds up to 3 + 3 + 1 + 2 cycles per byte, and an overhead of at least 6 more cycles per page crossed. You could shave off two cycles out of the loop by using addresses in the zero page, but since some of those addresses are reserved, you wouldn't be able to use all 255 bytes.
That means the fastest you could write a page would be something like this:
STA 56579, 255
LDX, #0
LOOP:
LDA $BUFFER,X
STA 56577
DEX
BEQ LOOP
In order to do DMA, the controller would need to plug into the expansion port, which gives you direct access to the address and data lines of the system bus. But as another poster pointed out, you have to blank the video during transfers to achieve maximal throughput due to the VIC-IIs habit of stealing cycles for itself.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--