Amiga 500 online with Null Modem Cable and Raspberry Pi

[lantus360]

I have a fascination with getting old hardware online.

A few weeks ago i caught this blog - http://jmp.no/blog/cheap-overkill-amiga-network-adapter

TLDR version - he was able to get his A500 online using a nulll modem cable plugged into his Raspberry Pi.

So.......I decided to give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised how simple it is. Unfortunately i couldn't seem to get any speeds better than 19200 bps but i will try artser.device and other 3rd party serial.device replacements. it might allow for better speeds.

I made a vid on how it all works. I did skim a little bit. You need a bit of linux experience to configure the RPi side. In the end i was able to set up the PPPD in my startup so i don't actually need a mouse/kb/display for it to work. Just connect it up to the amiga , wait 30-45 seconds for RPi to boot into debian and connect with Miami. As long as your PPPD is running in your startup and listening for your hosts IP address over the serial port it will will establish a connection.

Even better would be to connect up a wireless ethernet adapter via the RPi's USB and it would become a true ghetto ethernet solution for any Amiga =)

Here is a vid on everything working. IBrowse and AmiIRC perfomance is actually pretty decent. Remember this is running at 19200 bps on an A500 with a 4 color WB screen

[m]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEonOb5SkEg[/m]

Amiga specs:

A500 - Revision 5 mobo (512k chip)
ACA500 with ACA1232 030/40mhz connected. 128 Megs FAST
Indivision ECS

Next project is getting my X68000 connected. Stay tuned =)

 

[MartinW]

As other people have said in the comments. "Awesome, now I have a use for my Pi" And of course something else to mindlessly consume hours and hours of my time

 

[LTAC]

 

[stians]

Cool! Funny to browse amibay and stumble across an article linking to my blog ;-)

The 19.2k restriction (unless you try experimental drivers) are a bit limiting, and I've been playing with the idea of writing a custom parallel version for the RPi. By using its GPIO ports I could make something similar to the plipbox, http://lallafa.de/blog/

Good work, and a very good and informative video!

 

[keitha]

Awesome I have to agree it isn't too bad (speed wise) considering

Back in the day (late 90s) the maximum modem on the 1200 was 28k via the standard serial. To over come this limitation,(i.e. getting the full use of 56k modem) an internal clock port serial device was needed. I don't believe there was ever a 500/500+ solution tho.

 

[lantus360]

stians - awesome blog post and my initial reason for wanting to try this out. Dan Wood also did a great vid on getting his Amiga on a BBS using a similar setup. I eagely await his C64 online video next

A parallel version would be fantastic. Let me know if you get anywhere with that

keitha - yeah you are correct about that. A500 was always 19200 from memory. I still have not experiemented with 3rd party serial device replacements yet but i dont expect to be able to squeeze any more bps out of it

 

[MartinW]

So is the limitation on the Amiga side then? Would an A4000 be able to go any faster? The other question I have is that either the blog post or the video (I forget) suggested powering the PI from the printer port on the Amiga. How much juice can that supply? Because for the PI to be stable it needs up to 1A...

 

[lantus360]

Initially i thought that since i was running an 030/40mhz it would have helped but it doesnt appear to. i think its related to chip ram speed and DMA .

in other words an A4000 (with RTG) should be able to handle higher speeds than an A500. I was running an 8 color magic wb. If i drop it to 2 colors and give it another shot tonight.

 

[demolition]

Last time i used the serial port, I was able to go to 38400 in the A1200, while the A600 wouldn't go higher than 19200, so it might be related to chip ram speed since the 1200 is using 32 bit access to the chip ram.

 

[MartinW]

Oh right, I just assumed we were talking about serial port speeds here!

 

[MindWalker]

I was pleasantly surprised how simple it is.

You need a bit of linux experience to configure the RPi side.

Err, could you elaborate on that a bit? I am fascinated about this (and have a RasPi) but all I see is "oh, you need to know some linux to do that" but exatcly what I need to do? If I have a brand-new just installed RasPi, what do I need to setup? Why is everywhere IP given as 10.0.0.1, is that something the RasPi by default sets itself (instead of familiar 192.168..) and how would the Amiga side be set up with Roadshow? Or would it work at all?

Sorry, confused

 

[MartinW]

I can't offer advice on exactly what you need to do yet as I've not gone into it myself yet, but just a little explanation on the IP addresses...

"The more familiar 192.168" is a bit of a generalisation really. For some reason nearly all router manufacturers default to dishing out 192.168.1.x or 192.168.0.x IP addresses when they ship their routers. But that is just one of a few received ranges that have been officially reserved for internal NAT use. The idea being you can use them safe knowing that if nobody will have those IPs exposed on the internet. And if they do, it's their fault, not yours!

Personally, I use 172.16.5.x, and 10.0.0.x is another range...

for full info, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses

---------- Post added 22nd February 2014 at 01:22 ---------- Previous post was 21st February 2014 at 23:48 ----------

I've just sat down to watch the video. I'm only about 9:30 in and already my brain is going like the clappers!!

So, yeah, I was originally thinking that I have a Raspberry PI sat around doing nothing (I guess a lot of us do after the initial excitement wore off). So i figured yeah, this would be great, and so on. Now as I get in to the video and I see that it's basically PPPD over USB to Serial, I'm thinking, hang on, I use a MacBook Air as my day to day computer. And I've already used that in the past to connect to my Amiga and transfer files using a USB to Serial cable.

So now I'm thinking, why do I need a PI, when my MBA is already sat on the table next to the USB Serial cable and the A4000 (yeah, I'm not paying big bucks for a Zorro based network card even though it's capable!). The MacBook Air can do the job of the PI.

So that's the first thing I shall try.

So I google PPPD Mac and the first thing I find is someone rigging up a serial cable to the GPIO pins. Now that get's my mind rattling down another option...

I've got a cheap and nasty, but VERY functional USB Bluetooth RS232 adapter that I've already proved can be used to create a USB Serial link between a Mac and another device. In my case, I so far have only experimented between Mac and PC over Bluetooth RS232, but my goal is 8-bit retro based

So now I'm thinking Bluetooth RS232 link the Amiga to the outside world via a Mac or PI or PC (whichever you so desire - though you're on your own with PPPD on Windows because I can't help on that).

If I can shake off my cold, I shall be playing this weekend to see what I can do...

Dammit, I'm easily sidetracked !!

 

[MartinW]

I'm just downloading a linux distro to try this on, but in the meantime, any thoughts as to why I might be able to connect from the Amiga to my Mac and view the website that is running on my Mac (172.6.5.121) quite happily but if I try to reach a different local server, 172.16.5.5 i can't get anywhere?

I've tried setting the gateway in Miami to both the IP of my mac that's running PPPD and also to the IP of my router (172.16.5.1). Neither seems to make any difference and I can't really find any other routing options.

The pppd command that I'm using is as follows:

sudo pppd -detach /dev/tty.usbserial 19200 noauth local passive xonxoff proxyarp ms-dns 172.16.5.5 persist 172.16.5.121:172.16.5.33

(Scroll for entire line)

Proxyarp and ms-fns are just my attempts at getting something working and can probably be ignored since I've tried with and without these. Persist just means when I disconnect pppd will stay running and wait for another connection. Local means that it's not a modem and without it, pppd just hangs waiting for a carrier. Passive means if it doesn't get an LCP response straight away it will wait for one.

Any ideas?

---------- Post added at 15:51 ---------- Previous post was at 14:24 ----------

Just updating - got it working...

IPv4 Forwarding needs to be enabled.

On Mac:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.forwarding=1

On linux (Ubuntu at least, don't know about the PI specifically as I haven't dug mine out yet).

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf (as root). Find this line and uncomment it:
#net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

Now make that setting take effect...

sudo sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

Now if I can work out how to get DNS working...

 

[3583Bytes]

On linux (Ubuntu at least, don't know about the PI specifically as I haven't dug mine out yet).

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf (as root). Find this line and uncomment it:
#net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

Now make that setting take effect...

sudo sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

Now if I can work out how to get DNS working...

Any update on this, I am about to attempt this.

 

[MartinW]

What are you after an update on? The above worked and I was using it fine. I've not used it since because I've not needed the Amiga online since but I might want to download a couple of small utils from Aminet today as it goes. IF I get time, which is a big if as I've got a lot on today.

---------- Post added at 13:08 ---------- Previous post was at 11:21 ----------

OK, I just spent the last hour revisiting this as since I last used it I'd reverted from ClassicWB to vanilla 3.1 for performance reasons so MiamiDX wasn't set up properly any more (well, actually it was MUI that was not installed).

Only thing that tripped me up was that IPV4 forwarding was not enabled so I obviously never worked out how to make that survive either reboots or OS updates on Mac (pretty sure Mavericks has been updated since I last did this).

Once I remembered that needed enabling I was away again. Should have just read my own post above first

I think my comment above about not being able to get DNS working was actually caused by the lack of IPV4 forwarding rather than DNS.

 

[3583Bytes]

What are you after an update on? The above worked and I was using it fine. I've not used it since because I've not needed the Amiga online since but I might want to download a couple of small utils from Aminet today as it goes. IF I get time, which is a big if as I've got a lot on today.

---------- Post added at 13:08 ---------- Previous post was at 11:21 ----------

OK, I just spent the last hour revisiting this as since I last used it I'd reverted from ClassicWB to vanilla 3.1 for performance reasons so MiamiDX wasn't set up properly any more (well, actually it was MUI that was not installed).

Only thing that tripped me up was that IPV4 forwarding was not enabled so I obviously never worked out how to make that survive either reboots or OS updates on Mac (pretty sure Mavericks has been updated since I last did this).

Once I remembered that needed enabling I was away again. Should have just read my own post above first

I think my comment above about not being able to get DNS working was actually caused by the lack of IPV4 forwarding rather than DNS.

Thanks for the reply,

I am trying to get this working on my Raspberry Pi, but there is no clear tutorial on what settings are required on the Pi so I am trying to hobble together information from several different posts. Your's makes it work via a Mac,

This one is on the Raspberry Pi but through serial rather then a USB to serial

http://jmp.no/blog/cheap-overkill-amiga-network-adapter

This video achied exactly what I want but has no information how to setup the Pi with the exception of that pppd command which won't work (but it has all the Miami settings which is great)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEonOb5SkEg


So far I got as far making the connection between the Amiga and the Pi. Miami states:

Interface 'ppp0' is now online,

But when I ping or do anything I get a 100% packet loss

The command line I am using on the Pi is:

sudo pppd -detach /dev/ttyUSB0 19200 noauth local passive xonxoff persist 192.168.0.130:192.168.0.131

Where 192.168.0.130 is the address of the Raspberry Pi
Where 192.168.0.131 is a random IP address I selected that is not currently being used on the network.

I enabled ip forwarding (at least I think I did) by

Editing:

/etc/sysctl.conf

Running:

sudo sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

Originally you mentioned that you may get this working on the Pi so I was wondering if you ever did

Any help would be apreciated

 

[watsonfmly]

I know this is an old thread, but not as old as it could have been.

I have been fighting with setting up ppp over a null modem cable to my PC or rPi.


Some history, I am a software developer, with my hands in Windows and Unix administration. I understand systems.


On Windows, I am able to get Amiga Explorer working, so I know my cable and connection is good.

Having that turned off, I tried to setup a PPP connection.

On the Amiga side, it seems pretty simple going through the setup for MiamiDX or the Genesis. I tried both.

On the Windows side, I followed many how-to writeups on how to do it. No luck. I even went back to as far bask as Windows 95 on a box.

For the Raspberry Pi, I tried the various blogs.

Is there a definitive how-to on this?

If I can get it working, I will make one (if one does not exist).

 

[Yulquen74]

I did something similar with a routerboard pcb (very cheap) mounted inside my A500+,
see EAB thread http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=71428
I got a college at work to set up the routerboard as a ppp-server, which
connects to the amiga using null modem cable (fixed or auto baudrate), and local lan.
If theres interest, I can get hold of the system image, which can be transferred to
the routerboard using the winbox application.