What hardware for Amiga 500 to Broadband?

[paulcan]

What hardware for Amiga 500 to Broadband?

Is this even possible I have 2 amiga 500's (one 1.3 the other a 500+ 2.04)
I have a null modem cable attached to my pc so via amiga explorer can transfer anything.
Do I just need some software and it can use my broadband on the pc, or am I waaaaayyyyyy off?


Any help greatly recieved.

Thanks

[alexh]

Why would you want to do it? What would you do?

[paulcan]

I have no idea I'm just
Just wanted to see porn on an amiga, and that probably wouldn't be viewable would it?

Originally Posted by alexh

Why would you want to do it? What would you do?

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by paulcan

I have no idea I'm just
Just wanted to see porn on an amiga, and that probably wouldn't be viewable would it?

Broadband through a null modem cable is just as slow as dial up, but it's probably possible to get it to work (don't know how).

As for the porn (or any other jpeg image), there are certainly enough picture viewers for the Amiga, but, you might need some extra ram, and without an accelerator, it's going to be slow, and without aga it's not going to be pretty, and you'll need proper image conversion software to get reasonable results on an A500.

[alexh]

Waste of time if you ask me.

You're gonna need to spend upwards of £300 on an A500 to get it to the point where you can browse the internet in anything like the way you do on the PC.

And it will still be a crap experience. Slow, few colours, most sites wont look correct or load at all because of poor Amiga web-browsers.

If you started with an A1200 or A4000 it would be cheaper, but not by much and still be a poor experience.

You'd spend all the money, time installing stuff, try it once for half an hour, think "Thats crap" and never do it again.

Forget it and do something more fun instead.

[coze]

if you want to see porn on your A500, just get the stag series and watch them

[Jope]

Or copy a bunch of gifs and jpgs to floppy and use a gif viewer.. Like the rest of us did in 1992.

[coze]

I think you guys should forget about viewing jpgs on a stock A500. It is quite painful even on a A1200 or A3000. though you probably meant iff. but anyway.

[Jope]

Indeed it was slow. The disk drive was almost faster than the gif decoder.

[Paul_s]

The actual Amiga computer is porn so look at that instead

[orange]

yeah, just like mentioned, your 'best bet' would be to reduce resolution and save as HAM iff (on PC, there are programs for it or use UAE).
it won't look so bad on TV.

[Zetr0]

'come on guys..... the Amiga is an Adventure.... its not about the destination its about the Journey


@Paulcan

Lovin' that Can Do attitude.... you wont need much investment to connect to the broadband internet.. just a lot of TIME!

you can use FTP's / Telnet services / I think you might even be able to join a few MUD's and newsgroups and IRC's etc.

Theres more to the internet than just webbrowsing,

HTML Web Browsing is just not going to happen on an 8mb a500... personally I wish some one had wrote a WAP broweser for the Amiga, that would indeed be awesome and wouldn't need that much processing power.

Hmmmmm now that would be a cool coding project for the miggy, I would love to tie-it-in with ppill's Hombre project!

you will need a hardware and software interface to your router or network sharing PC, so this comes down to howmuch you want to spend really...

by far the cheapest is a NULL Modem Serial cable to a Network Sharing Device that will appropriate a TCP/IP Stack vai the serial to the device....

heres a bit of software for the PC (Windows 95/98/ME/2K/XP) heres a Net for 2 - 3.0 software download

You will need to configure the internet/network connection sharing on that PC machine

It may be wise, to point out, reading up on networking could be a good idea here..

now for the Amiga a couple of options exist, but before we throw out lucsious linkies all random like please have a read here

now lets give you a link to Null TCP

heres a little more info if you are setting up a SLIP proxy on Linux, it may give you a little more insight to setting it up via windows

now, lets give you some programs;

IRC clients for the Amiga

Amiga ICQ clients

FTP Clients


What more could a little 8MB A500 want?!

[info]

Serial Baud Rates (10 bits per byte)

you should get between 57600bps(56K) - 115200bps(112k)

as you have a SCSI HD8+ this will drastically improve your serial perforamce, I doubt you will get to 115200bps as I am sure you would need atleast an 030 to get that speed, But i am confident you will get 64 - 72KBps pending on load and maybe what else you might be doing.

to give you an idea of this speed, the Floppy disk drive is about 64KB a sec.

*remember

Document your Journey, and add some pics as you go for others to discover

[alexh]

Right tool for the right job.

[Zetr0]

Originally Posted by alexh

Right tool for the right job.

that implies work m8..... this is FUN!!!

making it happen! thats what its about....

even in 1994/95 I could of bought a PC that had better internet capabilities....

its not always about comming first.... sometimes the reward is in the particiaption

[mr_a500]

HTML Web Browsing is just not going to happen on an 8mb a500

Here I am, posting this from my 8Mb A500. Guess what I'm doing? Yep, that's right... I'm viewing porn.

I have a second browser tab, a page with some badly dithered porn, but I also simultaneously have a 24-bit DCTV porn image on another screen. Nice, eh?

[rare_j]

One day, hundreds of years into the future, a team of archaeologists will finally crack open MR_A500's a500 and find, under a photo of an a500's innards, it's actually a pentium pc on a mini AT motherboard, and he was having us on all along.

Probably.

[coze]

Originally Posted by mr_a500

Here I am, posting this from my 8Mb A500. Guess what I'm doing? Yep, that's right... I'm viewing porn.

I have a second browser tab, a page with some badly dithered porn, but I also simultaneously have a 24-bit DCTV porn image on another screen. Nice, eh?

but your A500 have a 020 or 030 derringer AFAIR right ? I think Alex meant a A500 8mb with 68000 (a plain HD8+ or something like that)

[Paul_s]

mr_a500 is my idol

The force of the 500 is strong with him!

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

this is FUN!!!

Not in my opinion it isn't. The poor bugger will just end up with a huge anti-climax.

Originally Posted by Zetr0

making it happen! thats what its about....

The experience is what it is about. And everyone who knows the Amiga realistically understands the experience of trying to make an A500 access the internet will not be a good one.

Originally Posted by mr_a500

Here I am, posting this from my 8Mb A500. Guess what I'm doing? Yep, that's right... I'm viewing porn.

How much is the additional A500 equipment you have worth? Several hundred pounds no doubt.

How long did it take to render one page? How many sites failed to load before you found one that did?

[mr_a500]

One day, hundreds of years into the future, a team of archaeologists will finally crack open MR_A500's a500 and find, under a photo of an a500's innards, it's actually a pentium pc on a mini AT motherboard, and he was having us on all along.

No need to wait hundreds of years (...unless you want to). See my A500 innards here. There's no pentium, but there are some broccoli-related hardware pieces.

How much is the additional A500 equipment you have worth? Several hundred pounds no doubt.

No, I weighed it and it's only a few grammes.

If you're talking money, it's almost exactly £300. I do NOT recommend spending this on an A500. I did 7 years ago because I got a bit obsessed with perfecting my old computer. Back then, browsing the internet was a lot more fun too because sites didn't use too much CSS, javascript or fucking flash. Browsing on an A500 is now too painful. This year I finally went high-speed and I now use BeOS on a free PC for all my porn. (I don't really browse porn... well... not on purpose)

Thankfully there are a few free dialup numbers I can use to still access the internet with my A500.

How long did it take to render one page?

Well it depends on how many naked girls are on the page, doesn't it.

I should post my "Definitive Guide to Viewing Porn on an A500". There's a system that works quite nicely.

[whiteb]

Originally Posted by mr_a500

Here I am, posting this from my 8Mb A500. Guess what I'm doing? Yep, that's right... I'm viewing porn.

I have a second browser tab, a page with some badly dithered porn, but I also simultaneously have a 24-bit DCTV porn image on another screen. Nice, eh?

Well come on, tell us what you are using to connect to the web (Hardware/Software) unless I missed that part.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by whiteb

Well come on, tell us what you are using to connect to the web (Hardware/Software) unless I missed that part.

IE6?

[ppill]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

HTML Web Browsing is just not going to happen on an 8mb a500... personally I wish some one had wrote a WAP broweser for the Amiga, that would indeed be awesome and wouldn't need that much processing power.

Hmmmmm now that would be a cool coding project for the miggy, I would love to tie-it-in with ppill's Hombre project!

Not going to happen for a couple of reasons. One you'd need a TCP/IP stack compatible with 1.3 kickstart. There's one called AmigaNOS but it's a pain to configure (I gave up after reading the manual). Second, the speed you'd get would make it nearly impossible to do anything useful/practical, even text stuff like FTP, IRC, E-Mail etc. The serial port on a bog standard A500 can handle 19200 bps when using system friendly devices and that's with a two colour screen and CPU's usage almost at 100%. If you settle for less speed I guess you can give it a try.

It would be a "fun" project and probably you could learn a few things along the way but you'd end up with nothing even remotely useful.

Now if someone would port an 68000 TCP/IP stack (there's one out there somewhere, can't remember the name) and write (in assembler) a set of internet utilities that would bang the hardware directly and come up with an easy way to attach a network card to the expansion bus, then...

If a C64 can do it why not an Amiga500?

But sadly, we all know that's not going to happen.

[Zetr0]

@ppill

theres a guy over on world of sinclair names Winston, he has developed a TCP/IP stack for simple ZX Spectrum.

I will have a chin-wag with Winston see what hurdles there were to writting it.... I need something code-wise to inspire me to get back into coding

[Photon]

paulcan said "An A500". Doesn't mean it's worse (or better!!) than any other Motorola-based Amiga. An accelerator board would increase your options and enjoyability tho, I think. I'm not quite there yet when it comes to internet on Amiga knowledge, but I think iBrowse on any Motorola-based Amiga without an extra graphics card would let any PC/Mac/Linux-user down?

As Zetr0, the purveyor of enthusiasm in this thread said, it's about making it happen. The only difference to other Amigas is that it might be trickier to get a driver and setup a TCP/IP stack. Quite apart from that, I've not seen a single ethernet card or adapter for A500. That means that there is no driver for this nonexistant hardware either.

One solution could be a PCMCIA connector on a card for the expansion port or memory slot. If it were in the same memory space as PCMCIA on A600 (above 4mb fast ram, ie. $600000 and up?), maybe A600 drivers could work with some modification?

This could work if there's no special chip handling the PCMCIA communication. Does Gayle do that? If so, then drivers would have to be modified to communicate over the expansion port directly. THAT, I think is the hard part.

What is NOT impossible is that some hardware hero could build such a board and ask someone to modify the drivers.

Me, I'd love to see that for my A500-040. Wouldn't that be uber cool?

[ppill]

Tiny TCP/IP http://www.sics.se/~adam/uip/index.php/Main_Page

I think even someone over at amiga.org ported this but it requires a 2.x kickstart to work.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Photon

Quite apart from that, I've not seen a single ethernet card or adapter for A500. That means that there is no driver for this nonexistant hardware either.

I have, there is a version of the Hydra Amiganet card for the A500. I even owned one at one point.

Works with the samed drivers as the ZorroII version. Actually it IS the Zorro II version, just with the A500 jumper set and a 86pin connector soldered onto it. All in a nice case.

I wouldn't bother trying to find one though.

[mr_a500]

Originally Posted by paulcan

I have no idea I'm just
Just wanted to see porn on an amiga, and that probably wouldn't be viewable would it?

Here's a screenshot from my A500 (it's not exactly porn... damn those posting guidelines )

As you can see, it's badly dithered... but anything want to see in more colours I just right-click, save and run jpgtodctv to see it in 24bit with DCTV.

[Zetr0]

Originally Posted by ppill

Tiny TCP/IP http://www.sics.se/~adam/uip/index.php/Main_Page

I think even someone over at amiga.org ported this but it requires a 2.x kickstart to work.

Now gonna be looking into this, I am curious to see what 2.x dependencies are required, maybe they could be included in hombre ?

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Jope

I have, there is a version of the Hydra Amiganet card for the A500. I even owned one at one point.

Works with the samed drivers as the ZorroII version. Actually it IS the Zorro II version, just with the A500 jumper set and a 86pin connector soldered onto it. All in a nice case.

I wouldn't bother trying to find one though.

Awesome So what is needed is to make a card that works like the Zorro II version (rev 1.2, I guess since it has 10baseT?) that goes in the expansion port, and the drivers should be sorted? Any FPGA wizards out there?

Here are the drivers for the Zorro II version http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/amiganet2000, as I see it there should be no (or hardware-fixable) difference in addressing etc, so the drivers should work as is on A500 with a jumper or so?

Why the Zorro II version? Well as you say Jope it might be not as super rare, so maybe an FPGA dev could borrow one and preserve this hardware that I didn't even know existed...

BNC is nostalgia Maybe put another connector on there too

Shouldn't any TCP/IP stack work when the driver is correct? I thought it was some kind of unit like PAR: (but not PAR: ofc...)?

[mr_a500]

If you're truly insane (and rich), I think this is the ultimate way to get A500 broadband:

1. Viper 530 (030 is minimum for USB stack) Price: 300 euro... if you're lucky on eBay



2. A500 clockport adapter & Subway USB. Price:100 euro (now on sale!) -Individual Computers



3. USB Ethernet. Price:8 euro - very common



I was going to try it myself, but then I realised that after ALL THAT, I'd still only be browsing with a non-CSS browser in 16 colours.


Edit: I forgot #4. Mini Megi 2Mb chip (...or you run out of chip RAM damn fast) Price: 100 euro

[Lockon]

@mr_a500

Well said.
I started almost the same project a year ago. Got A500+ expanded to 2Mb CHIP, GVP A530 with full 030@40, 8Mb FAST, clockport, Subway and USB-Ethernet adapter. It doesn't work as expected. USB stack is pooling CPU inserting interrupt every few miliseconds reducing overall speed to a crawl (best guess - I'd say something similar to 1% of stock A500 feel). Guys from E3B said that has to do with accelerator design and frankly, I guess they're right. One lucky Amiga user at A1K.ORG has similar setup run on PPS040, it works like charm.