plipbox 0.3 released

It took quite a while but now a shiny new release of plibbox is available: The new version 0.3 is an AVR firmware and Amiga driver update and works on the same hardware as presented in 0.1 and 0.2.

The major change in this release was motivated by Nitz76, one of my commenters in the blog: plipbox firmware now implements a MAC bridge and no IP NAT gateway anymore (see this technical introduction for details on the differences). In short: While with the old firmware you created a point-to-point IP link from the Amiga to your plipbox and from there the traffic was NATed and routed to your local ethernet, the new approach directly presents an Ethernet card on the Amiga side and passes the Ethernet frames generated from the Amiga TCP/IP stack directly via PLIP to your local Ethernet.

This approach is much more compatible in your local network infrastructure as the NAT is avoided. The change required a larger rewrite of the SANA II driver and therefore I heavily modified the original MagPLIP implementation and renamed the new driver to plipbox.device (the new source code is now also hosted in the plipbox source repository). Please see the updated Amiga Setup guide for installing this driver on the popular TCP/IP stacks including AmiTCP, Genesis, MiamiDX, and Roadshow.

The new MAC bridge made a lot of the TCP/IP code of plipbox obsolete and allowed me to shrink the firmware size considerably. Furthermore, setting up the firmware is zero-conf now, i.e. you don’t have to adjust any parameters for default operation.

This release now hosts all the docs on GitHub right next to the source. It is more convenient there to keep the docs in sync with the implementation and writing markdown is really fun! Another goodie in this release is the plipbox Emulator written in Python that allows to emulate a plipbox setup in FS-UAE. Its esoteric but really helpful for development: see my previous log post for details…

Enjoy!

Emulating plipbox with FS-UAE

Recently, I had some time to spend and wanted to work on the plipbox project’s Amiga driver. Unfortunately, I only had my MacBook Pro with me and no Amiga or plipbox hardware.

What does a SW developer do if the real hardware is not at hand?

Yes, you write an emulator that represents the missing HW in SW on a machine you have access to…

Continue reading