WiFi modem for all Amigas?

[Zippy Zapp]

@Matthey

And how many A500/A1000 units are there versus A1200/A600? Were you around in the mid 80's to early 90's when BBSing was popular on C64 and Amiga? We plugged in a modem on the serial port and had a great time dialing into BBSs. There was nothing lame about it. I have a few other Amiga friends and they are excited at the possibility of a Modern take on the modem so I think there is more room other then just "Amiga Retro gamers" being "All that's left".

Ok perhaps not a ton of A2000 and A1200 users if they already have a network device configured, but this is still an easier experience for terminal software and no HD needed. Plug in, boot up a terminal and enjoy. Can you say that for the A1200 PCMCIA network adapters and browsers? I have one and you need not only an HD but a major accelerator and memory expansion because a stock A1200 and network solution is simply not good enough for web browsing and other TCP/IP apps. This opens up terminal and BBS use to a ton of unexpanded A500/A600/A1200 users.

[Amiga1992]

You can access the internet with any fucking computer, your phone, a television or maybe even a toaster. Nothing fun about doing it with an Amiga.

A BBS is many times more fun a prospect than any looking at shitty memes on reddit.

[HelloBeautiful]

I think telneting to boards is fun (and useful) and find wget on Amiga very useful when I need something from say Aminet. My CD32 and A1000 would very much like this.

[Sir_Lucas]

Originally Posted by matthey

Would it be possible to allow a WiFi "null modem" connection between 2 Amigas for games like Stunt Car Racer, Lotus II/III, Falcon, Skidmarks, Alien Breed 3D, etc.?

This is interesting. If it was possible that would be a neat thing.

[jiffy]

I will most likely buy one for my A500.

The C64 WiModem is a realy cool device, I use it almost daily. :-)

[mistermsk]

I have a wireless card and a wired network card for my Amiga. What I am going to use this for is to use old software that was originally wrote for a modem to be able to be use it again. Nothing against the web browser for the Amiga. But, unless you are running a 1200/4000/4000T with an '060 50Mhz or above. The web browsering portion is kinda slow hitting graphic intensive sites. This opens the internet up, or at least accessing telnet BBSs, for the Amiga 500 users as well.

I can't wait to buy one.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by Zippy Zapp

And how many A500/A1000 units are there versus A1200/A600?

There are no doubt several times the number of Amiga 500/1000 units vs Amiga 1200/600 units but if you compared the number of active users it would be much closer. The Vampire 600 is allowing more Amiga 600 units to become active. The Vampire 500 will allow more Amiga 500/1000/2000 units to become active but last I heard, the current design does not have internet connectivity (ethernet or WiFi). I expect the Vampire 500 to sell in the thousands of units which would likely be a bigger market than old BBS guys using stock Amigas.

Originally Posted by Zippy Zapp

Were you around in the mid 80's to early 90's when BBSing was popular on C64 and Amiga? We plugged in a modem on the serial port and had a great time dialing into BBSs. There was nothing lame about it. I have a few other Amiga friends and they are excited at the possibility of a Modern take on the modem so I think there is more room other then just "Amiga Retro gamers" being "All that's left".

I used a modem and did some BBSing. This is still possible with your old serial port modem or through telnet and I never asked for the modem/telnet feature to be removed from Jim's hardware. Advancing technology has antiquated the modem and BBS. Holding back features from the Amiga will just make it more antiquated as well.

Originally Posted by Zippy Zapp

Ok perhaps not a ton of A2000 and A1200 users if they already have a network device configured, but this is still an easier experience for terminal software and no HD needed. Plug in, boot up a terminal and enjoy. Can you say that for the A1200 PCMCIA network adapters and browsers? I have one and you need not only an HD but a major accelerator and memory expansion because a stock A1200 and network solution is simply not good enough for web browsing and other TCP/IP apps. This opens up terminal and BBS use to a ton of unexpanded A500/A600/A1200 users.

Many of my floppies don't work anymore (humid midwest of U.S.). I won't use a stock 68000 Amiga for anything including games because so many of my floppies are bad and I'm not a masochist. I've had good luck with accelerators and HDs which are game changers. I thought the Amiga was currently primitive enough but some people want to go back to hunting and reinventing the wheel it seems. I think most would prefer a new enhanced Amiga but then that isn't easy either with the parties holding the Amiga hostage.

Originally Posted by Akira

You can access the internet with any fucking computer, your phone, a television or maybe even a toaster. Nothing fun about doing it with an Amiga.

The Amiga has failed to make the internet fun because there aren't enough Amigas online for Amiga online games. There aren't even enough Amigas in use to make Amiga games. The AmigaOS could have standard resources to allow a friend list to connect to and voice or text chat while playing games or using apps. Other major OSs have 3rd party applications which allow this but don't have the integration, control and consistency that OS resources could provide. Of course the Amiga can't even follow technology with the lack of leadership and tiny market today. Affordable hardware could show the path forward but maybe too many of the users keep looking back even as the technology and hardware enabling them to go into the headwinds is more advanced than the original hardware they used. Surely you realize the usefulness of the internet even if you don't understand what I'm talking about because the Amiga is dead. It is certainly quite useful to have connectivity for pulling down software off the internet and local networks.

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by matthey

The C64 does not have web browsers, aminet, e-mail programs, online games, etc.

Yes it does!

Yes, it would be possible to make two units null modems. You would just need the IP for each.

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by nogginthenog

Yep. I think I used 57600 or more back in the day.
Alternatives I know of are 8n1.device & baudbandit.device.

I wrote about using a Raspberry PI 1/2 to add serial internet access to my A4000/030: http://c0dedbad.co.uk/raspberrypi-amiga-ppp/

Interesting. I think I could make this work with Miami. You have a broken link on your webpage - the Miami setup example.

[emufan]

while we are at it:
ESP8266 Serial WIFI Module
First Impression on the ESP8266 Serial-to-WiFi Module
ebay sells them for around us$ 2.50 each.
not arguing here about price, maybe just an alternative.

is this the chip you are using Jim?

[JimDrew]

No, I am using its bigger brother. It uses the same ESP8266 chip but with 4Mb of EEPROM. This is needed so the WiModem can do remote firmware updates by downloading the latest version from my server and then flashing itself. My module is also the FCC certified version so it can legally be sold in a commercial product.

[emufan]

thanks for info. if you card is not limited to just telnet'ing BBS, it will gather much attention, for sure.
alot a500 without inet connect out there.

[nogginthenog]

Originally Posted by JimDrew

Interesting. I think I could make this work with Miami. You have a broken link on your webpage - the Miami setup example.

Fixed. I moved to a new server and I'm new to Wordpress.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by matthey

Would it be possible to allow a WiFi "null modem" connection between 2 Amigas for games like Stunt Car Racer, Lotus II/III, Falcon, Skidmarks, Alien Breed 3D, etc.?

Should work, no problem...
I have a Lantronix Serial to Ethernet device with Modem emulation and that works..

I've used it to play Firepower over the internet with someone in Georgia (I'm in Oregon), which is a bit over 2000 miles...

I figure it's pretty accurate, because I lost just about as quickly as I did when I was using modems back in the day.. ;-)

Now, that was a modem game, not a null modem, but the Lantronix supports NULL as well..
I suppose the latency might cause an issue on games that expect reqlly quick response????

desiv

[matthey]

Originally Posted by desiv

Should work, no problem...
I have a Lantronix Serial to Ethernet device with Modem emulation and that works..

I've used it to play Firepower over the internet with someone in Georgia (I'm in Oregon), which is a bit over 2000 miles...

I figure it's pretty accurate, because I lost just about as quickly as I did when I was using modems back in the day.. ;-)

Now, that was a modem game, not a null modem, but the Lantronix supports NULL as well..
I suppose the latency might cause an issue on games that expect really quick response????

Each null modem game will probably have a different reaction to lag. It is the fast paced real time games where it is likely to be a problem and then the data constantly re-transferred is probably small. Maybe we will find out soon. It would be fun if UAE would emulate Jim's hardware and WHDLoad would allow TCP/IP null modem emulation and all could connect to each other and play but that is probably asking too much in Amiga land.

[DrBong]

@JimDrew
Very impressed by your WiModem for C64/128, so a version for the Amiga with a few more bells & whistles as suggested by others already would go down well IMHO!

Originally Posted by matthey

The Amiga 1200/600 have PCMCIA which supports WiFi and is reasonably priced but other classic Amigas are expensive to add ethernet and/or do not support WiFi.

Dead wrong on all counts. There are many cheap options to add ethernet and/or wifi across the whole Amiga range. Even on big box Amiga's all you need is a cheap USB card (e.g. Rapid Road ~$90) + wireless ethernet adapter (~$10). You might want to have a read of this nice summary of options:

https://amigafun.wordpress.com/2014/...on-your-amiga/

Originally Posted by matthey

The C64 does not have web browsers, aminet, e-mail programs, online games, etc.

Originally Posted by JimDrew

Yes it does!

Indeed! The C64 has had the Contiki net suite since the early 2000's Unsurprisingly, web browsing is quite limited.....but everything you mentioned is available on C64/128 (and without necessarily needing to buy expensive hardware add-ons either!). Geez, there's even a Twitter client!

https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/0...es-8-bit-atari

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki

http://www.protovision-online.com/ha...hp?language=en

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http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtop...b8e94524e86d6c

http://commodore128.mirkosoft.sk/networking.html

http://www.slideshare.net/leifbloomq...nternet-on-c64

[HelloBeautiful]

I hope this is still on even though the discussion has withered,

[JimDrew]

Still looking into it. Probably a dual purpose product of being a modem as well as a network card, connecting via the parallel port.

[paul1981]

Brill!

[Zippy Zapp]

So is the jury in yet for an Amiga WiModem?

For me personally I am thinking similar to mistermsk, would rather have something for Telnet/BBS use. I have a network card for my A1200 and rarely use it because of speed. But for BBSing the WiModem that plugs into serial would be perfect.