Networkboot ROM for Amiga/68k

[codeflash]

Seems you are right. For documentation purposes:

limewebs.com/romwebby/60-560.rar
Contains 60-560/Apollo_src.lha which contains ROM/rom.s that says:

Romtag:
dc.w RTC_MATCHWORD ; UWORD RT_MATCHWORD
rt_Match: dc.l Romtag-RomStart ; APTR RT_MATCHTAG

Code comments in German with some English.

So it seems to be the real deal. Just got to figure out how to make it create a DOS device and not block device
I wonder if rom.s can be done using C all the way?

[codeflash]

I found som interesting network cards at bboah.com: Network Cards:

Kato Developments: Unity Net 100 (claunia.com/unity100)
Is a Zorro-II network card that has it's own PCMCIA bus that is connected to a 100BaseTX 100 Mbit/s PCMCIA network card which would made it the only Zorro card to provide 100 Mbit/s networking provided it had been released to the public.

Resource Management Force: QuickNet / QuickNet 500 (using MB86950B controller)

Once the "master-server" is completely installed, all the "slave" machines will display a requester when they boot, containing a "username" and a "password" field. /../ On some diskless machines, you may boot remotely from another machine on the network.

Perhaps the last one has the hints in ROM on how to insert a filesystem driver into the boot process?
In particular it has SANA-II driver in ROM and supposedly supports diskless booting.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by codeflash

Perhaps the last one has the hints in ROM on how to insert a filesystem driver into the boot process?
In particular it has SANA-II driver in ROM and supposedly supports diskless booting.

It says TCP/IP is most likely not used which makes it much simpler, they probably use some simple custom protocol. No need for dos or any other dependencies, "simple" network filesystem only.

[codeflash]

No need for dos as in they use a block device? which should interfere with block allocation handlers on other computers also writing to that disk. Or did they succeed with a hack that circumvent dos.library altogether?

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by codeflash

No need for dos as in they use a block device? which should interfere with block allocation handlers on other computers also writing to that disk. Or did they succeed with a hack that circumvent dos.library altogether?

No, I meant that because they use their own custom network code, they can have single network filesystem handler (executable file that works even when added to RDB) that contains all the required code. There is no need for external dependencies like external network stack.

[codeflash]

Well, that could work. To make it work at all is the hard bit. From a working start point one can modify step by step. The problem with this project is that there's no starting point at all.