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Crispy
Sunhillow

Posted Mon Dec 07, 2020 4:14 pm

This is my latest "find". It's an Amiga networking solution that uses the external floppy port, and it's actually very good.

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I call this a find because I literally had to find all of the pieces that were scattered around the house. I originally bought it in 1995, but never really did anything with it, and had completely forgotten about it.

It all started a few days ago when I was looking for a DB-23 connector in my spare parts box. Instead of finding the connector that I was looking for, I came across one of these Amiga-Link connectors. This caused me to immediately abandon the project that I was working on, and go on the hunt for the rest of the pieces. I managed to find everything, and was happy to see that not only did it still work, but that it's 1.3 friendly and works on an A1000.

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Amiga-Link is a peer to peer networking solution designed primarily for Amiga file sharing. The network driver, however, is SANA-II, which means that it can be used with a TCP stack such as AmiTCP, Genesis, or Miami. In fact it came with a fully licensed copy of Envoy. Unfortunately all of these network stacks only run under 2.04 or greater. There is no TCP stack that runs under 1.3, so for these older systems Amiga-Link is limited to file sharing only.

Hardware installation is a breeze. Just plug the connectors into the external floppy ports, and connect the computers together with the included RG58 BNC cable. When the product was being sold you were able to buy extra connectors that would allow adding more computers to the network. The manual states that Amiga-Link supports up to twenty computers on the network and a maximum cable length of 300 feet. I'm actually using a 50 foot cable to connect between my A4000 and A1000 which is in another part of the house.

Software installation is fairly straightforward. It uses the standard Amiga installer for both 2.04+ and 1.3. Under 2.04+ all configuration is done through a nice graphical interface, but under 1.3 everything is command line driven. In either case, it's very easy to use; just export the drive on one computer, and then mount it on the remote computer. The drive on the remote computer looks and acts just like any other local drive.

While not as fast as other simple networking solutions such as those that use the parallel port, Amiga-Link does have a couple of significant advantages over these other solutions. It allows for cable lengths of up to 300 feet, whereas parallel port networking is limited to at most a couple of feet. And, it uses disk DMA for data transfers, so CPU usage is very light. Surprisingly it's actually faster than floppy disks. The following table shows a comparison between Amiga-Link and floppy disk when copying a large file to the ram disk. Size is in bytes, and time is in seconds.

Code: Select all

SIZE      RUN 1    RUN 2     AVG TIME    ACTION
---------------------------------------------------------------------
839600    31.11    31.020    31.065      C:Copy NET:data RAM:
839600    80.059   79.918    79.986      C:Copy DF0:data RAM:
901120    33.001   33.006    33.0035     C:Copy NET:test.adf RAM:
901120    59.433   59.271    59.352      TrackTool READ RAM:test.adf DF0:
The nice thing about this "find" is that I now have storage for my A1000. I created an 80 MB hard drive partition on my A4000 that I export to my A1000. Using a KickWork type disk, I can boot my A1000 from this network drive. It's not nearly as fast as a hard drive, but it will do until I can find a StarDrive SCSI module for my StarBoard.

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Last edited by Crispy on Tue Dec 08, 2020 6:32 am, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
fxgogo
Twickenham , U.K.

Posted Mon Dec 07, 2020 5:02 pm

That looks amazing. It has been decades since I last saw coax network cables. Clever trick using the floppy port.

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stevelord

Posted Tue Nov 02, 2021 6:11 am

Sorry for necro-ing. Is there anything in the documentation that explains the internals of how it works? Schematics, notes etc?

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Crispy
Sunhillow

Posted Wed Nov 03, 2021 11:48 pm

Unfortunately no, It seems to be closed source / closed hardware.
https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboa ... spx?id=899

I took one of the connectors apart to see if it might be possible to reverse engineer it, and found that outside of some standard logic (74HCT123 and 74HCT27), it has a GAL16V8B which no doubt is read protected.

From what I gather, it was developed in Germany by a company called AmLink, and was sold there as DiskNet. It was sold under license in the U.S as Amiga-Link by a company called AmiTrix, and they attempted to buy the technology, but couldn't afford what AmLink was asking.

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McTrinsic

Posted Thu Nov 04, 2021 10:24 am

Ask Team Germany like with the Rejuvenator ;)

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randyrenfrow

Posted Wed Dec 21, 2022 12:22 am

I have had one of these in a box since late 90s and found them recently. But forget how to configure it. I did find the install disk that came with it that i had backed as a dms file and it works. I wish you would can the manual, I would love to see what it says. I remember it shared printers as well as hard drives between computers.

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amokle

Posted Tue Oct 31, 2023 4:00 pm

The developer of AmigaLink was/is Nicolas Benezan (https://benezan.de/). It was distributed in Europe by ABF Computer.





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