Alright guys, back again with another video today. I thought I'd talk about a little project I've been working on.
I've been watching a couple of videos about getting old Amigas on bulletin boards
using RS-232 and null-modem cables. I found a particular gentleman's blog
who got his Amiga 500 online
using a Raspberry Pi, and
this is something I've been really interested in. I've got this fascination about getting every piece of equipment on the internet,
whether it be gaming consoles or old computers, and
getting an Amiga 500 online is a pretty difficult task.
In the old days, you could just kind of connect up using a dial-up modem, and that would work fine,
but in this day and age of Ethernet cards, it's almost impossible to get one online. There's no
network, Ethernet-type, solution available for an A500 now
the ACA-500, which I kind of did a bit of a mini review of in my last video. There is actually a clock port, and
the potential to get a network expansion,
but at this point in time, the A500 is one of the only Amigas that doesn't have a
PCMCIA port or a Zorro port, where you can actually connect a network cable or connection or a card to.
The 600 and 1200 have the PCMCIA port on the side, and
The kind of the big box Amigas have the Zorro slots, which allow you to connect,
just, you know, either PCI network cards or, you know, Zorro based network cards, so
this is a fun little exercise, and I got this to work and what I want to show you is how this all works.
So basically, what you need to make this work is obviously you need an Amiga 500 to start with.
Getting one that has an accelerated
CPU and more memory is advisable. Of course this will probably run on 68000, but
you know, mileage may vary and stuff like that.
Now, this is the null modem cable. I've got this from Micro Center. Just fairly bog standard. There's nothing special about that and
what you want to do is basically, I think, Dan Woods' video. He actually had his connected up to his PC,
but what I've got here is a Raspberry Pi. Now, these things, if you don't know,
are mini-computers that cost all of $35, and
this is basically a low-power, low kind of spec
mini-computer that runs a variant of Linux.
And these are kind of for hobbyists and to mess around with, but the cool thing about these things is,
it comes with an HDMI port, an ethernet port, and a couple usb ports, so you can plug it into a
monitor, mouse, and keyboard and obviously have some kind of ethernet connection to make it work, so
what you actually need to get for this to make it actually work via
RS-232, is an RS-232 expansion. Now, there's two ways you can go about this. The first one is you can actually use the
GPIO port inside of this thing,
and that's like a TTL to RS-232 expansion, and you can pick those up for about 4 or 5 bucks on eBay.
There's a million people selling them. The second option is to use a -
which is what I'm using -
let me see if I can grab it here -
just get behind the monitor here -
It's basically a USB-to-RS232 solution.
Sure now that's happened. Let's pull it out. So something like this, where you've - you've got a
USB connection into your raspberry Pi and
there's your RS-232 port or your serial port. Now, I will say that
I've heard mixed reports about these types of solutions, some of them work, some of them don't work, the particular one that I'm running here is
by Parallax.com, and it's a revision-B board and I'm not really sure much more about what the model is but
it works fine. I think it's got the
MAX232 chipset, I believe that's what it's called, so you mileage may vary there,
but this thing works fine, and this cost me all of
17 bucks at Micro Center, so basically total cost of parts here is the Raspberry Pi, cost 35, and
this thing cost 17, and I picked up a null modem cable as well. Which was another, I think $8 or 9.
So, you know, pretty cheap and -
and I took a bit of a gamble because I wasn't sure if this was going to work, like
I said, the the particular blog that I saw had -
was using a TTL to RS-232, and was going in by the GPIO
connections inside the unit here, so I wasn't sure if the USB solution would work, but
to my pleasure it actually does work, so let me show you how this works on the Raspberry Pi side.
So I'll be back here in just a second.
OK, we're back, and we're at the boot screen of the Raspberry Pi now.
And I don't want to spend too much time messing with this, but basically the way this thing works, you
as mentioned, we've got our Raspberry Pi connected. Then we've got the serial - the USB to serial port plugged in and
If I can show you this here, as you can see, it's - it's green, which means it's got a connection.
Well at least it's ready to to do some stuff. I'm sorry about the focus there
So, if I log into the Raspberry Pi,
what we want to do is we want to start a PPP daemon. Now, in the old days of
modems and dial-up modems and stuff like that, PPP was the common standard of getting a
computer online, and the way it works is, it's called Point-to-Point Protocol.
What that means is, if you specify a host IP address and a destination IP address,
you should be able to establish a connection,
depending on the type of -
Basically what this is doing here is
it's saying I want to start the PPP daemon in
the - with the USB device that we looked at before, and it's going to run at 19200 baud, or
bits per second, kilobits per second, and
the first IP address is the host IP address, and the second IP address is the destination IP address. Remember,
we're talking about P2P, which is point to point, so there's a host IP and a destination IP.
So if I run this script,
the PPP daemon is going to be listening for a connection.
Now, the reason why we can only use 19200
kilobits per second is because the Amiga serial port
can't handle anything faster. I've tried it with faster speeds and
you just can't get a connection or a stable connection to work, so -
So let's run this.
run - run this launchnet -
Now that's running and in the background. It's waiting for a connection.
So what we want to do now is jump over to the Amiga side,
and show you how that works.
OK, so we're on the Amiga 500 here and
what I'm going to do is
I'm going to start Miami, which is the
TCP/IP client, and this is one I kind of recommend for
Amiga 500, and kind of slower Amigas.
Now, I've already got this pre-loaded so I'm not going to configure it again, but basically if you look at the hardware,
We have a serial hardware,
using the built-in serial driver, and you can see the speed is the same as mentioned. If we try to make this any faster,
it doesn't work. You can't get a -
an established connection to work.
You don't have a dialler. our interface is our PPP interface as mentioned,
and obviously Miami will
have support for PPP. So does AmiTCP and Genesis. I'm not sure about some of the other
TCP/IP clients for the Amiga, but I think all of them should work and
as you can see, our IP address is 10.0.0.2, which if you recall
over here is the -
is what the PPP daemon is kind of listening for.
and a gateway is set to dot-1. And everything else is kind of normal.
You can see ppp0 is now online and
that's all there really is to it. So now to prove this actually works,
let's kind of run a couple little applications. So I'm going to minimize this
Let's iconify.
So now if I run a telnet session - I'll run AmTelnet -
And if I say I want to connect to 10.0.0.1,
As you can see, we have a terminal session into our Raspberry Pi, so if I log in
set the terminal emulation to VT100,
let's try that again.
As you can see,
yeah, we're in. I was trying to illustrate this thing here, but this thing will flash red when
there's data flying back and forth, so we're connected. So any time I kind of press a key there,
you can see it's - it's - it's registering. It's sending those packets to the -
to the Raspberry Pi,
so we can kind of take this further and show you some web browsing and some IRC.
You'll see how IBrowse works, actually doesn't run too badly at the - at that particular speed.
This is IBrowse, let's kind of just click on AmigaWorld.
and there's our network activity there,
now remember this is all across serial port,
pretty slow, but even still this page seems to load pretty - pretty quickly, so
it's not - it's not too bad. You know, it's a pretty good kind of solution.
Now of course if you want to start talking about downloading files, that's going to start getting pretty slow.
I don't recommend you actually download files,
because you will be locked in at a pretty slow download speed.
You'll never get anywhere near as fast as dedicated network speeds.
But that's IBrowse.
So we've got our web browser.
Let's just do one more test, and jump over to Aminet.
Yeah, we're in there, that's not terrible at all, and
if we flick over to
IRC, I'll show you how that works.
Let's connect up.
So there you go. We're in now. We're on the abime.net channel.
Now the last thing I want to kind of show you was, what I've managed to do is get the
Raspberry Pi to that particular script that I ran, what I've done is I've set it up in the startup,
so you don't actually have to have a mouse and keyboard to log into the system to run the script, and
the goal of this was to basically just have it plugged into the Amiga
without any kind of mouse and keyboard and display,
so you just turn the power on and wait a minute for the Raspberry Pi software to boot up,
and then get connected. So let me just kind of show you how that works. What I'm going to do is shut this down,
and if I just go offline,
I'm - alright, so I'm offline here, and uh I've already got this loading at startup. So if I basically
unplug the display and
there's no easy way of restarting the Raspberry Pi except for a
three finger salute, there's no kind of hard reset switch.
We'll just put the camera down here for a second.
So I'm just unplugging the keyboard that I had.
So now, I've just got the power connected, the Ethernet port and
the serial port for the USB-to-serial, and
if you just let this kind of boot up, give it about 45 seconds, I've got that particular script running in the startup
So like I said, the goal of this is just to have it kind of sitting behind the Amiga,
waiting for a connection rather than having a display to, you know, to have to run it every single time.
This is, like I said, this is kind of like a ghetto
network adapter, and that's how I'm kind of treating it as. So, I think that should be enough time let's try
jump online again
probably just not enough time yet - oh, there it goes. Oh yeah, we're - we're connected so as you can see it's just
the PPP daemon is running in the startup, and we're back online.
So again, should be able to jump in our Web browser,
just to make sure it works,
we're going to AmigaWorld this time, there you go, it's loading up.
Let's try Amiga.org.
This actually runs pretty well, considering it's an
A500 with an '030 accelerator. This is only a 4 colour screen. I don't want to
start cranking up the color and the resolution, that really eats my chip memory.
I only have 512 (KBs) of chip memory in this particular 500, so as you can see we've already lost about half of it.
So this is loading the Amiga.org page, and this is a new
site that I've never been to before, so it's going to take a little bit longer, but
you know it's - it's loading - the loading up the - the page fairly - fairly quickly,
all things considered. Now, I
have heard reports that there are more optimized serial devices you can try, and I will actually see if
The ArtSer device and some of those other serial device replacements actually will help.
I would like to actually get the speed - the baud rate speed - up higher than
19200 baud, but
we'll see how we go there, but
any case yeah, I just want to show you this cool little
experiment, and I will finally say that this is not my invention or creation.
You know, connecting computers via RS-232 is something that's people have been doing for years, and
this particular one, with the Raspberry Pi, I came across on a blog on a particular gentleman's page,
that he had already done. The next thing I'm interested in doing is getting my
X68000 connected up. I know there's a TCP/IP stack, and it certainly comes with an RS-232 connection as well, so
I'm going to see if I can get that online, and once I do manage get that online I will put up another video.
But yeah, I just thought I'd show you this cool little
experiment, or project I've been working on,
and yeah, if you want to get your A500 online,
this is a pretty cheap and easy way to do it, at least certainly until there's a
dedicated kind of network solution for it,
but in any case guys, thanks for watching, and
I'll catch you again. Bye for now.
