Monthly Archives: November 2013

plipbox 0.5 released

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Release 0.5 of plipbox is now available and contains a software-only update that ships both a new Amiga plipbox.device driver and a new AVR firmware.

New features are:

  • Most important change is the handling of the MAC address. While in previous versions you had to set the correct MAC in both the Amiga driver and the AVR firmware, the new version automatically transmits the MAC address from the driver to the firmware. Inside the driver you can alter the address with SANA-II commands (if your TCP/IP stack supports it). This allows you to set different MACs that are required if multiple plipboxes are running on the same network.
  • I also added some features of the Ethernet chip to be enabled by firmware parameters: Namely full duplex mode and flow control are new options you can play with to tune the performance.
  • The new firmware also tracks the online/offline state of the driver and enables or disables the Ethernet module accordingly.
  • On the firmware’s command console I improved the device statistics output by adding the number of filtered, dropped or erroneous packets. Furthermore a new error log shows you if errors were found on the parallel transfer.
  • Under the hood quite a lot changed: I re-wrote the whole parallel protocol to use a client (Amiga device) server (AVR firmware) model. That better fits our application as the old MagPLIP way assumed a peer to peer protocol on the parallel line. This driver driven approach simplifies the protocol significantly and obsoletes collision handling…

Now grab your copy of the new release on the plipbox page and have fun!!

Networking on the Minimig with PPP and Roadshow

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When working with an Amiga running on a Minimig platform then data transfer is not as convenient as one might think: You have an SD Card connected and copying files around with SD Card is not the biggest deal, but unfortunately your Amiga is currently running from a system drive stored on this card :/ Each copy operation therefore essentially requires a reboot of your Amiga and that’s not the productive work flow I had in mind…

That’s the reason why I always prefer having network access on all my machines for truly covenient file handling (e.g. with FTP, wget…).

In my last post I showed you how to add a SilverSurfer high speed serial port to your Minimig running on the Turbo Chameleon 64. Now we will use this serial port that is running up to 115200 Baud with ease for something useful: networking! Old farts remember the times when home network access was done with PPP and a serial modem gateway. We’ll go that road but replace the modem and gateway with a small and cheap Linux machine, here the all hyped Rpi and a direct serial “null modem” link via an USB-to-serial adapter.

TC64 with SilverSurfer attached to Raspi

TC64 with SilverSurfer attached to Raspi

Read on to find out all the glory details, starting with a pure “virtual” simulation running on a Mac on to the real thing…

[You can use this approach to bring other classic Amigas to the network, too. But for all machines with a parallel port available I’d suggest to use my plipbox project: Its far easier to setup, a lot faster (4-5x ), and even cheaper :)]

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