Amiga 600 with a Raspberry Pi inside

[jayminer]

Here's a short video I made of a project I have been working on recently, just for fun: [ Show youtube player ]

So basically, there is a Raspberry Pi installed internally inside the A600 and connected to the serial port (at the blazing speed of 38400bps, 57600 almost worked with NComm but it was unstable) and it can be used to transfer files too and from the Amiga.

I show off some tools that makes it easier to download files from Aminet and slaves from the WHDLoad website, and also a quick tour of the insides of the machine!

[Amiga1992]

Nice one.
If you can't get bast 384000 I would try a different terminal program, because I remember not being able to push it with certain ones and working better with others. For example, the shell utility TwinXpress I managed to use at 115200.

[jayminer]

I have tried quite a few different terminal-programs, with NComm I could use 57600 but I would get CRC errors every now and then and some parts of the file would have to be resent, so the end result wasn't much faster than just using 38400 - and NComm was a bit crashy for me so I ditched it.

I did try most of the terminal-programs I could get my hands on (NComm, Termite, Terminus, Term...) and found Terminus to be the best of the bunch. I'm open to suggestions for other software if anyone has any ideas?

If I understand things correctly, TwinXpress is some kind of "filesystem" and not a terminal program?

[Amiga1992]

Did you try reducing the color depth to 1 bitplane?
TwinXpress sends data between two computers through serial port, it's not a filesystem but it's also not exactly a terminal program.

[jayminer]

Yep, I tried 1 bpp aswell but it didn't really do any difference for me, and Terminus was quite speedy with it's text rendering so I decided to go for 2bpp since having some color is always nice.

[rare_j]

Nice video,looks like a fun thing.
With all that spare ram in the a600, could you run tcpip over the serial connection to the pi? Then you could use the pi as a network bridge? Would that make things any easier?

[jayminer]

My first idea was to use ppp and run TCP/IP but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of just having a serial terminal to the pi.

But it would definitely be possible! I used to do this on my A1200 way back before I got a PCMCIA ethernet-card for it.

[Amiga1992]

If your only option on a 68000 for a TCP/IP stack is AmiTCP, I wouldn't even bother.

[kolla]

You can replace your memory expansion with one that has clockport, and use silversurfer for much faster serial speeds. Or, maybe it is possible to connect Pi to the parallel port, and have it offer various services more directly (PLIP-bridge, storage, sound sampler etc).

[hooverphonique]

you should use a replacement device for faster speeds, in case you're using the stock "serial.device".
unfortunately, it's been many years since I used the serial port, so can't remember names of replacements...

edit: quite a bit of choices here: http://aminet.net/search?query=serial+device

maybe the diskport one could be interesting :-)

[jayminer]

I'm using 8n1.device, which is the best serial.device replacement from what I've gathered?

I definitely will have to look into that diskport-one, sounds quite interesting indeed and cheaper than going the Clockport and silversurfer-route - even if that would be nice aswell.

[kolla]

Hmm, I need to look at that DiskPort thing too, I get the impression that it only works between up to 4 amiga computers.

[jayminer]

Yeah, I downloaded it an read the guide, it's only for connecting amigas to each other, unfortunately.

Well, 38400 for sending stuff over isn't too bad, it's not like I'm in a hurry