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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
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.
Well, in some countries there is a minimum age to purchase alcohol. In the US, its 21. According to: http://oldcomputers.net/c64.html the commodore was released Jan, 1982. Making it 21 years old, or, old enough to drink.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
No. It can't.
Not much, I would think.
The C64 has a 1MHz 6510 8-bit CPU. The memory bus is also 1MHz. Moreover, the fastest instruction on the 6510 (which is a 6502 derivative) is two clocks. Thus, at four clocks per byte (two to read, two to write), the fastest data transfer rate you could conceivably get is 0.25 MBytes/second (in reality, it would be rather slower as the LDA and STA instructions take more than two clocks, but I don't have the timing chart in front of me).
The C64 does have DMA, but it's dedicated to video access and refresh and can't be redirected. Moreover, these DMA cycles completely take over the bus for 40 clocks every eight video lines. So your packet writes will likely hiccup from time to time. (Presumably they have big silos on the NIC.)
Even if the NIC did DMA itself, it would have to get out of video's way every eight lines, which means you couldn't flood the line indefinitely. Also, the C-64 has a mere -- surprise! -- 64K of RAM. At 1MByte/sec, you'd run out of RAM in 0.065536 seconds.
Schwab
C-64 Early Adopter
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions