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1.70 Mhz 8-Bit Ataris Get 10 Mbit Ethernet
point writes "Thanks to Chris Martin, 8-bit Atari power users can now enjoy 10 Mbit Ethernet, something that the Commodore 64 crowd have been able to do for over a year now... Time to pick up that age-old flamewar? An Ethernet-enabled Atari port of the Contiki operating system has already been completed, and brings the Atari users telnet, e-mail, a web server and a web browser. Pictures and schematics for the Ethernet card, as well as screenshots of the system in action on an Atari 800 are available from the project's webpage."
Why?
I mean? Why not just emulate it on a decent pc?
I suppose this is one thing I will never get used to.
Posting anon in case I actually get first post, and I don't wanna get modded down just for that.
I hope somebody figures out a way to connect networking hardware to the Nintendo Entertainment System so that yet another old 8-bit platform's port of Contiki can get net support.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I am actually looking to get the ethernet card for the Commodore 64 and run Contiki. Should be fun .... even better when a solid version of Wings gets nicely completed to handle it all.
Then I can hack an Atari 8-bit webserver with my C64!
But come on, we all know the C64 was way better than the atari... at least the C64 has hard drives to host files off. There's no way I'm using the 300 baud datasette.
"Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you."
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
1.70? I think you mean 1.79 Mhz. Geez-us. :-P
that their website is not hosted on one of those. It would be a pity for all that hard work to go up in flames. (literally)
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Now you can have multi-player pong LAN parties.
Three words: Internet Star Raiders.
http://saveie6.com/
Yeah, that would be cool. The easiest solution we've been able to come up with for communication would run through the controller port to a host program on the PC. There's posts about it on the nesdev.parodius.com forums. But I'm not sure if that can work with Contiki, maybe it can somehow?
I'd like to find out. I've got the commucication schematic already, it just needs to be tested. My kingdom for a devcart! heheh.
If anyone has any ideas, or is just interested, feel free to stop by the NES hardware forum.
-Memblers
Wonder what will be next...
A) Atari: 1024 ST.
B) Tandy: Color Computer { 1,2 or 3 }. Use OS9 or MS Basic as OS.
C) SWTP SS50 bus computer.
D) Smoke Signal Broadcasting: Chiftan.
E) Coleco: Gamesystem.
F) Coleco: Adam { If you can keep it running ).
Actualy its not the final results but the knowledge to get it going at all. Be fun to try!
Current Status:
# Compiling: Contiki, UIP, CS8900A driver, Telnet, Email, Web Browser.
# The Telnet only version works under SpartaDOS.
# Pings work, but many packets dropped.
# Telnet works, but looses connection.
So there is still a way to go. They have a work in progress but are not fully up.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
dust off my old Atari 800.
Retro cool here I come.
siggy played guitar
To each his own...
-PizaZ
The Gnome people should take a look at it.
10Mbit ethernet on an Atari 800.. A single ping would almost DoS it..
We'll see a CERT alert on this for sure!
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
The Atari ST has had web browser software for some time. It's called the Crystal Atari Browser.
There is no way that you can tell me everything you do for fun is USEFULL to the world.
Have you tried Linux yet?
Does this mean a networked version of M*U*L*E would finally become possible? Sweet!
It just occurred to me, with the "10 mbit Ethernet" reference in the title, that it would be harder than hell (impossible?) to push that much data on one of those 8 bit computers.
:-)
:-)
Assuming you're using only the processor, on an 8-bit machine the data speed ought to be very close to the clock speed; a 1Mhz machine probably could copy no more than 1 megabit, and that's assuming that it was doing NOTHING else, like interacting with the user.
Now, the Ataris have early versions of the some of the custom chips that were in the Amiga, so it's likely that at least some of the load might be able to be offset, but I'd be pretty amazwd if the machines could exceed 2 megabits.
Honestly, everything past a modem is probably overkill on these old machines; it's like putting tires and shocks to do 200mph on a Model T. No matter how hard you push down the pedal, it's just not going to go much faster.
It really puts things in perspective, though; I'm sitting here typing on my Web browser, downloading a TV episode off Usenet at about 3 megabits, and streaming Doll Revolution off the Mac via iTunes, playing it on a (kinda crummy) 5.1 surround sound system. And with all that going on, probably 95% of my processor time is going to Folding@Home.
Goddamn, what a difference a few decades make.
This kind of stuff is what would have happened if Microsoft and IBM had not destroyed "choice" back in the day.
Wouldn't it be cool if Commodore and Atari and Texas Instruments made some kinda comeback. The internet was a web of completly different platforms all talking via internet standards. Amigas, Macs and OS2 machines. No Linux/Unix vrs Microsoft.
I hope this kinda stuff continues. Even if it is just for fun.
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
One day you guys will be all excited to see that someone has built a subspace carrier-frequency card for the PCI bus and ported a neural-interface OS to the PC.
Maybe you should hack a bit with the software (drivers).
There are only subtle differences between the NE1000 (8bit) and NE2000 (16bit) network cards, and the code to recognize the cards may be misguided by the situation. You probably still can get it to work.
Years ago, I took an NE2000 card, mounted it on a piece of experimenters board, and fitted it into an Atari Mega ST (the ones with the pizzabox case under the monitor, that had a bus slot).
After modifying the driver that was in the Linux kernel at that time (1.0 days, I guess) it worked okay.
Unfortunately there was no openly available network stack for the machine, so I could only use it with KA9Q NET. So, I had telnet, ftp, smtp etc but no shared drives.
A lot of people like to ask "WHY?" when it comes to technology. But these little gizmos, which still work amazingly, answer a different question, "Why not?" Why not play with the old stuff?
Hmm, telnet. Clear-text passwords and all that. But it would be insane to try porting ssh to such a machine. So is there any way to get secure remote logins?
Perhaps you could generate a 100-kilobyte file of random data, get a copy of it at either end somehow (does this Atari have disk drives? maybe even put the file on tape heh heh) and use it as a one-time pad for remote connections.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
...can't even do that. (Can't find where to stick the ethernet card).
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Have a look at and/or try Contiki. It lacks SO much functionality that a modern OS has. Any comparisons aren't worth much.
Damn, we have ethernet for the C-64, Atari and even lightbulbs, but I still cant get my old A500 or A2000 on the 'net. Oh sure, I could dig up a really old, crappy Ariadne II board off of eBay for $500, but what's the point in that? I want something like this for the Amiga.
:)
Come on, it's got enought power to do something like this and you wouldn't have to build the GUI or OS - just the hardware.
Oh well, I guess a man can dream.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
Do you know Amiga 1200 with 12MHZ CPU - from user's feel side of view - felt WAY faster than 486/80MHZ with twice as much RAM?
Why? Better architecture. Not only CPU but whole computer. I can imagine employing the gfx chipset for such a work. It can move data between ports and memory at amazing (comparing to the CPU) speeds, fill large areas of memory with specific values, move memory areas etc. Without taking CPU time and without even the CPU waiting (so CPU may do its own stuff while GFX chipset does its own.
Let's make a very rough count...
10Mbps with traffic overhead of Ethernet etc (all that is stripped on hardware) is about 1 Mbyte/s. With 64K of RAM, it's about 0.064s to fill whole RAM. Assume screen frequency of 50HZ, gives 0.02s/frame. Transfer of 20K/frame required. For the CPU - way too much. For ANTIC (the gfx chip) - acceptable amounts I think...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Well, not really, the LANceGS has been available for over three years. It works with an Enhanced ][e or IIgs, although there are no apps for the ][e that use the interface. FWIW, Apple had created an ethernet card for the IIgs to be released with System 6 (GS/OS) but killed it at the last minute so as to not have the IIgs compete with the Macintosh LC.
-- Charles A. Plater
Assuming you're using only the processor, on an 8-bit machine the data speed ought to be very close to the clock speed; a 1Mhz machine probably could copy no more than 1 megabit, and that's assuming that it was doing NOTHING else, like interacting with the user.
Interresting logic. A poor old Z80 running at modest 4MHz was able to move, using a DMA companion chip, quite exactly 1MByte/s (4MHz, 4 clock cycles/byte). The CPU without any special chip was able to move a byte in 21 cycles (via LDIR command) from memory to memory (up to 64kByte block size) or from memory to I/O port (via OTIR command) or from I/O port to memory at the same speed, but only max. 256 byte in one go. That's max. 190 kByte/s.
Of course those are absolute maximum throughputs, but you could always crank up the frequency to 8MHz (more on later models). Saturating Ethernet is thus impossible without DMA chip, but not difficult with such help. And most 'good' computers had a DMA chip for things like hard disk.
If it's done as a bit of fun thats pretty cool, but if old computers can be put to good use then it's recycling. I'm thinking about getting a crappy old computer and installing linux and mozilla and making a littlew web browser for the kids. It would be a one trick pony, but it would save money and resources.
Let's go guys, keep this ball rolling!
Achille Talon
Hop!
Back in the olden days I ran a whole fleet of low end Linux boxes with 3c503 cards that I bought at surplus stores. The 3c503 card is an 8-bit ethernet card. I believe I was paying like $3 a pound for those cards out of scrap bins.
I started out, of course, with the 3c501, which is a horrible broken card that shouldn't be put on modern networks.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Too bad Windows XP will require activation and shut down 30 days into the project.
What about that goofy "expansion port" they have in the base of the NES? I can only fathom a guess that it was designed with the intent of releasing an unreleased disk drive (similar to the model released in Japan), designed to connect to the net and store games on said disks.
Maybe that would solve the problem, just need to hack together the communications hardware, RAM and disk drive. Perhaps a visit to eBay or whatnot can obtain the drive and then some reverse engineering can be done.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Use IRQs 8 or below, and you should be OK. IRQs 9 and above require a 16 bit slot...
The Atari joins the commode 64 in the ethernet department, and yet still no one has come up with a homemade ethernet adapter for the dreamcast, whose BBA (when available) runs over $100. Atari: 1.7(9...) MHz. Dreamcast: 200MHz, with a cdrom. Come on, people.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, but apart from the sucky color, slow floppy drives, nasty printer, slow CPU, crippled 6502 assembly language, limited embedded BASIC, slow tape drives, and the occasional explosion, the C64 was a great machine.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Getting warmer...
The more stories I see like this the more I realize hacking into the alien technology with the little laptop in the movie Independence Day really wasn't so silly after all... :)
The first thing I thought when reading this article was why? Then I thought why do I still have an Atari 800, Amiga 500 and 486-33 in my closet? Although I will never go to the trouble to get my Atari online, I think it would be cool to get my old, original Gameboy online, Any possibilities there?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
When will someone finish porting Contiki to the Apple II and write a LANceGS driver for it?
It was actually a port for a modem for online lottery services. It didn't come out due to fears of hacking.
Part of the allure of older hardware is just that, the hardware..
You cant emulate the 'feel' of a working ST.. its just not the same watching GEM poke along in a window as it is to really have it in front of you...
( yes i know this was about 8 bit atari, but you get my point )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You probably mean the 3c509 (which was a really nice 16-bit ISA card), not the 3c905 (which is a PCI 10/100 card). I have a couple 3c509's in my router box, they are very nice cards.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I just got an Atari 800 off eBay a few weeks ago. *sweet*
Oh, I forgot - I was gonna gut it for another project. Guess I'll have to get another. Good thing they're cheap!
I'm wishing for TI-apache and Tizilla to go with that, and then it will be practal.
SAILING MISHAP
I have taught my pet rock to play dead.
1.79 MHz CPU, and 8 bits per cycle, yields 14.32 Mb/s
You must've missed the part about Ethernet being a serial protocol.
How is it going to grab 8 bits at a time in one clock cycle when there is only one bit coming down the wire at that time? It can't process more than one bit per clock cycle because the second bit wouldn't have arrived yet.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
The ethernet PHY will be running at 10MHz, 1 bit/cycle.
The bus interface will be running at 1.79MHz (or some multiple/fraction thereof), at 8 bits in parallel.
Assuming good buffering, you could very easily saturate an 8 bit 1.79MHz bus with the output from a 10MHz serial line (which is essentially all that ethernet's PHY is.)
You're doing it wrong.
I'm thinking that the logical solution to the dropped packets would be to try to stuff some kind of processing in as a display list interrupt.
I'm also pretty sure Contiki isn't optimized for the Atari's architecture. It's designed to be portable. I don't know at what rate it services the TCP/IP connection but it should be done at least once every frame in a vertical blank interrupt.
Whilst newer hardware obviously has the speed advantage, there are some blessing to older hardware. The main one I can see is heat. Processors have become faster, yes, but heat-dissipation efficiency hasn't really come to where it should.
Now, while an Atari might be a step too far back for many practical applications (maybe you could use it as a relay-to-internet for some form of telegraph info though?) in looking at my older PC's there were no fans, and not much of a heatsink either. For my MMX233, it was running as a server with a
So situations where noise needs to be minimal, and heat equally so, modifying older systems to run semi-current technology might be useful. After all, there is a lot you can do with a "not-quite-dumb" terminal, but getting hardware to work on them is another story.
Maybe you need a computer that has one task, to display a little information and maybe have a submissal button/form, but it needs to interact with more modern machines. I think that in this case, an old Atari with an ethernet cable would shine through very nicely: low power consumption and little noise.
quite odd, they've developed it for everything from the vic-20 to the Nintendo, to the Co-co, wonder why they don't have it for the TIc? Oh, that's right.. It must be because the TI-99/4a has a 16 bit processor, and it's only for 8 bit systems.. (yes folks, the TI was the first 16 bit 'Home Computer' but due to bad coding, Bad marketing, (sorry Bill Cosby) and the fear of loss of money, it never went far with TI, but just check out the following, (including a 32 bit upgrade path) Myarc9640
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Every time somebody mentions running somthing new on somthing old, or not meant for it, SOMEBODY mentions Hey! Let's Cluster them!
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My advice would be to get at least 64mb of RAM and pref. at least 6GB of storage. And get an external modem. Getting Winmodems to work is more trouble than it is worth.
If you've never used Linux, try it. I tried installing both RedHat and Mandrake and both were no bother.
Thanks for the advice. I'm already running redhat 9 on my own pc and it's not too bad. One of the things that bugs me is that commands like fdisk are missing, I think redhat may have castrated linux a bit to make it safe. As an alternative I am experimenting with slackware 9, I want to be able to do more from the command line and slackware seems to be a good distro for doing that.
I remember seeing the price of a replacement keyboard for a TRS-80 in my local Tandy and it was UKP100.
Know your roots!