Hayesduino: Ethernet Hayes Compatible Modem
 

Hi all,

I haven’t been able to find much information on this forum or other Amiga forums, so I’m not sure if anyone here has already heard of Hayesduino by Payton Byrd. It’s an open-source project that turns an Arduino Mega 2560 into an Ethernet Hayes compatible modem.

A friend and I stumbled across this project in an effort to look for an Ethernet alternative to Wi-Fi modems for modem gaming. Although Wi-Fi modems seem to be great for connecting to bulletin boards, we had issues with latency for gaming, causing regular pauses in games like Super Skidmarks, or not even being able to connect with one another in games like Knights of the Sky.

We forked the project and made some changes to try and make it easier to connect and disconnect, including phone number spoofing in order to be able to connect using in-game dialers. I’m not really a programmer so most of the talent came from my friend. He also started adding a facility for dialing and changing settings using a touch screen, but unfortunately due to lack of time and will on his part, this is incomplete. Documentation has been updated to help those not familiar with Arduino’s to get themselves going.

Payton Byrd’s original project is found here:
https://github.com/plbyrd/hayesduino

My friends fork can be found here:
https://github.com/BODYPRINT/Hayesduino

Performance for us over the internet (100mbps down/40mbps up) is excellent, so we have had some really good sessions on Populous and Super Skidmarks. Knights of the Sky is problematic as it will disconnect after about 5 to 15 minutes which causes communications to lock up on the W5100 Ethernet shields. Due to our lack of experience, we don’t know why this happens.

So if anyone has the expertise and is interested, perhaps they can fork it and make further improvements to the code, because it really still needs some more work on it.

I’ve included a couple of videos of some gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pRJlQHixgs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zijkT7br0I

Will this work for games such as Lotus?

Unfortunately not. Lotus 2 requires requires pretty much near zero latency which is simply not possible over the internet or even LAN for that matter. We were able to connect to one another but it quickly disconnected not too long after that.

What about Vroom!? If I'm not mistaken that allowed modem play and LOTS of players... can this work over the Internet with your method?

So how I would it would be via Hamachi client and link ethernet of Amigas to a PC intermediary and then connect to the Hamaci IP address of the computer you want via Internet!

Technically it should. But the problem is the retail copy of Vroom comes with supplemental instructions which explain how to connect via modem. Unfortunately I can't find this documentation online and have no idea which baud it uses. I have tried various baud rates but can't seem to connect. The problem could even lie with the Hayesduino as the code is far from complete and we lack the expertise to make further improvements. So perhaps others with more experience can make contributions to the code.

My apologies, but I'm not entirely sure what you're asking or what the use case would be. The Hayesduino modems can connect directly to one another over the internet. The complete project plugs in between your Amiga's serial port and an ethernet port on your router. From there you "dial" the IP address of a friend who also has one. Explanations on how it works is in the documentation on Github,

Hi there
This video has a video of vroom multiplayer about 58mins. it might help
https://youtu.be/6B7PvMoHPa4