Yes.McTrinsic wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 12:10 pmI’ll try to translate that for me .
I’d be interested in a device that could on one side access my server via NFS or smb.
On the other side, it would be accessible from retro computers and offer a telnet-/terminal- compatible interface that would translate the network access to smb to the terminal emulation.
Yes, you could connect to it over the network if your Amiga is networked in some way. But what if it isn't, but you want it to be? On the A600 and A1200 this is relatively cheap, as there are drivers for both Wi-Fi and Ethernet PCMCIA network cards. (Although I had a good deal of trouble with Wi-Fi because my old card won't do the new security stuff. In theory the drivers can do this, not sure how much of the time that is true in practice.)I’d start with a raspberry to provide this kind of software. If, for example, you have an Amiga with plipbox or similar, you could connect the Amiga to this device.
Once that runs stable, you could offer expansions for serial or parallel or whatever.
So I think having an option to connect to the box through the serial port is an important feature that I want to support from the start. That could work with a standard USB-to-serial adapter plugged in the Pi.
Then the Amiga (or any other system with a serial port, such as an Atari ST or an old PC) could either use the terminal emulation interface, or use the Pi as a dial-up modem to connect to the internet.
Hm, my 1200 can handle HTTPS by itself with the latest IBrowse and I think AmiSSL to handle the SSL/TLS that powers HTTPS. Downside is the limited native AGA graphics (although the Indivision at least allows for workable resolutions). On my 3000 browsing the web would be better with its Cybervision card, but there RAM (8 MB fast) and speed (68030) are the limiting factors.And while we‘re at it: it would be awesome to be coupled with a local http->https translator. So that I could go browsing with my 030 Amiga again .
But the good news is that it should be easy to run a standard web proxy that browsers can connect to over HTTP, and then the proxy handles the HTTPS.
Extra credit: intercept images and scale them down to a more reasonable size if they're too large. And perhaps even convert 24-bit JPEGs to 256/128/64-color PNGs that an AGA Amiga can display quickly and easily.
(Although what we really need is a browser that displays JPEGs in HAM8.)
So I guess I just have to order a Pi and start tinkering.
I've done some research the past week and there are so many tools out there. Many are open source, so could be included in a box like this. There's also some very good commercial tools, such as SD2IEC (as opposed to sd2iec, the open source software) that will pretend to be your Commodore 8-bit floppy drive, and SVI-CAS, that can act as a cassette drive to all 8-bit computers known to mankind. The downside of those is that all the data is on SD cards so you have to swap those in and out if you want to transfer data between a retro computer and a modern one. I want network access! But duplicating the level of functionality of just these two devices would be a ton of work.
Anyway, it's important to separate the cool ideas from the realistic ones. After watching How Fast Can We Load From Tape? on the Noel's Retro Lab Youtube channel, I started thinking of a way to supercharge tape loading speeds (well, loading from some kind of a computer, not actual tape)... but it seems unlikely that something new, no matter how great, would gain widespread use.