networking classic hardware

On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Tom Sparks <tom_a_sparks at yahoo.com.au> wrote: Many years ago, I tried to hack a driver for the Xircom (parallel port) pocket ethernet adapters for AmigaDOS. I got as far as negotiations with folks within Xircom about getting information on how the devices talked to the PC parallel ports when they decided that they didn't want to "be in the market of supporting other platforms". I do know that they are not trivial to talk to, but perhaps there's now a Linux or BSD driver that could be inspected to divine out enough secrets to make an Amiga driver. I will say that it will never be fast. An 8MHz 68000 would have a hard time moving more than 200kb/sec peak without a DMA engine. There is native Amiga-to-Amiga parallel port networking available, but it's point-to-point (there never were cards for the Amiga for more parallel ports*, so it's one per machine) and AFAIK, nobody ever ported that code to a non-Amiga OS, so it doesn't help you connect up to a larger network. There were SCSI-to-Ethernet adapters that were somewhat popular in the older Mac era, but I don't remember anyone even attempting to use them on another platform. They would be difficult to find now, I'd expect. I would be "easy" to start with something like the same kinds of chips used by a couple different Commodore64 Ethernet adapters - the TCP/IP end of things is all handled by the chip (CS8900?) and the host just moves assembled packets to/from the chip via a simple interface. You'd still have to come up with driver support for each classic platform you wanted to support, but that's the same no matter where you go. -ethan * you could add a *printer* port, not a generic Amiga-compatible parallel port, to an Amiga by using a standard PC ISA card and a GG2 Bus+, but in practice, what folks did was to use those to talk to their printer and the Amiga native port to talk to digitizing devices (sound, Digiview, etc) because those expected to communicate with the 8520 CIA register set not an ISA card. OTOH, if you already have a GG2 Bus+, you can use a simple 10MBps ISA networking card and write no software whatsoever. A solution for an A2000, but not an A500 (you need a box with ISA and Zorro slots to mount the GG2 Bus+. There was never enough of a market to adapt the design to a slap-on-the-side version for the A500/A600. Technology wasn't the issue - it would work. It was just never financially feasible to design and build the product). -ethan